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June 5, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:32
June 5, 2014, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24 7 Podcast.
And just in time, just in time, it's so fortunate that the program is starting right now because we have some breaking news for you.
Obama's made another trade.
Now look at the staff in there.
You so much dislike it when there are guest hosts doing the program because you don't know what we're going to say or what we're going to do.
You don't worry about what Russia's going to say or do.
You're worry about this.
This isn't in the what it what?
What trade?
No.
I'm armed in here.
I've got the internet.
I've got all these TV monitors.
I'm on top of breaking news.
Obama has made another trade, as you may know he's in Europe.
Happier there, I'm sure.
He's in Europe.
He just made a trade with Putin and the Russians.
They get Florida, the New York Philharmonic, and Apple computer.
We get four buckets of Borscht and a Joe Stalin coffee mug.
It's a deal.
Another shrewd Barack Obama.
All right, that's not funny.
I know.
I know it's not funny.
What do you expect?
I'm the guest host.
It's not that funny, but it makes a point.
And it's not just me that's trying to be funny at his expense.
He's being really for the first time in his presidency.
He's starting to get ridiculed.
I mean, the nighttime talk show hosts, you know, every now and then Leno and Kimmel, they'll take a shot.
You just hear it kind of in more places right now with people.
You know, 80% appalled by the Bergdahl deal, those that don't like it, and the other 20% just shaking their heads that okay, fine, he's a big time lefty.
He done buy the war on terror.
He wants the empty Gitmo, all of that.
Can't they make it look any better than this?
I mean, he comes out and he holds the announcement almost tearful.
We're so thrilled to be able to get Bergdahl back.
That goes over like a big giant rock in the ocean.
I mean, just splash and nothing.
The rock just disappeared.
Nobody was all that happy to get Bergdahl back.
By the moment that he said it, virtually everybody who served with him was coming out calling him a deserter, complaining that we lost lives trying to rescue him.
So they bring out all these other stories.
None of it is taken.
So now they've got to reset the spin cycle.
They're changing the story a little bit.
We're now going to offer a new narrative.
There's a sure way of knowing what the narrative out of this administration is.
All you have to do is pick up their own personal diary, the New York Times.
Top of page one today.
There it is.
Behind POW's release, urgency and opportunity.
The story.
Look at all look at all the bylines on this.
I mean, we've we've put everybody to work over at the stenographer pool at the New York Times.
Mark Mazzetti, Eric Schmidt, David Sanger, Helene Cooper, all four of their names are on the story.
That means we got just about everybody in the White House spin room.
Gotta call the New York Times in.
We've got to put out a new line.
Four of them are in there and they're going to feed a new story, a new explanation.
Well, they wouldn't be required to do this if the first story, if the first explanation hadn't gone over so terribly.
So here it is, the New York Times breathlessly reporting because they think they have a scoop.
You don't have a scoop.
What you have is the opportunity to go out and tell whatever today's lie of the day is.
Here's the New York Times.
Weeks before a Black Hawk helicopter lifted off in the dying light of Eastern Afghanistan.
Oh yeah, there this is real Raymond Chandler stuff.
Weeks before a Black Hawk helicop.
Weeks before a black this is just terrible writing.
Weeks before a Blackhawk helicopter lifted off in the dying light of Eastern Afghanistan, carrying with it an American soldier who had spent five years in the hands of the Taliban.
American officials grew in key increasingly worried that Sergeant Bo Bergdahl's life might be in jeopardy.
A video produced by his captors months.
Another video.
Here we go again.
This has Benghazi all over again.
It's another video.
A video.
A video.
The story's now going to be premised on a video.
They saw a video.
That's why Benghazi occurred because some people out in Libya saw some internet video promoing something or not.
That's why it happened.
It wasn't a terror attack.
Now, the white, well, we saw a video.
A video produced by his captors months earlier had shown him weak and dazed.
And there was a growing fear that the Taliban, frustrated by the glacial pace of hostage negotiations, were beginning to rethink the value of continuing to hold an American prisoner.
Officials from Qatar, who had long been the middlemen in the deliberations for a deal that would free Sergeant Bergdahl in exchange for five Taliban prisoners were issuing warnings that the Americans pr American prisoners' days could be numbered.
Oh.
So now it's not just that he's sick.
Remember, they gave us that one a few days ago.
Now it's that the Taliban was ready to kill them.
Well, how come Obama didn't say that a few days ago?
Why are we reading this now in the New York Times?
Now it's that Bergdahl was going to be killed.
That's the implication from this sentence.
And they blame it, of course, on what the administration is saying they were getting from Qatar.
There's like 17 levels of deniability in here.
We're issuing warnings that the American prisoners' days could be numbered, setting in motion a flurry of secret discussions on two continents about how to choreograph a battlefield of change of prisoners.
Issues that had bitterly divided the Obama administration about the wisdom of the prisoner swap and the risks of releasing a group of aging Taliban commanders from Guantanamo Bay were swept aside in the rush to secure Sergeant Bergdahl's release.
Notice, by the way, that in what I'm reading here from the New York Times, so overwritten as it is, there's no attribution of any of this.
This is all stuff the New York Times has learned.
Well, they've learned this version, this altered version of events, because that's what the White House has decided to spin out today.
At the same time, much of the fate of the administration strategy was now in the hands of Qatar, the tiny wealthy emirate that in recent years has used its riches to amass great influence in the Middle East and Central Asia.
President Obama spoke by telephone with the Amir of Qatar to finalize the terms of the deal, and delegates from Qatar were quietly sent to Guantanamo Bay in late May.
Their presence a surprise to those who saw them in the dining facility at the island military prison.
See, the White House feeds them that little little detail.
So now we know the New York Times is in the loop.
They were eating in the dining room at Getmo.
All right.
Now, all of this, of course, is nonsense.
I don't buy any of this for a minute.
it.
If indeed there was terrible fear that the Taliban was going to kill Sergeant Bo Bergdahl, and that was the thing that motivated this.
We wouldn't be reading it on page one of the New York Times on Thursday.
You would have been reading it Monday or Sunday after President Obama made his announcement.
If the White House felt that this was the reason that we were going to justify making the deal, it would have been the original version of the story that was told.
Instead, the way this thing was originally presented was we had the opportunity to bring home an American who was in grave health.
Then they add in, don't worry, these five Taliban guys are going to be closely monitored in Qatar.
Turns out Qatar's, we're not going to be monitoring them.
In other words, the original story started to fall apart.
When they originally planned this, Bergdahl was going to be a hero who would come home and Obama was his rescuer.
The story spun out of their control when we learned that there are serious questions about how Bergdahl became a captive in the first place and whether or not he was a deserter.
Members of the Congress, members of the Senate, are upset that they weren't briefed.
So you've got all this criticism being directed at the administration, and suddenly a story that was supposed to be a positive one for them has turned into a negative one for them.
So in their continuing incompetence, and trust me, incompetence drives everything they do.
They have liberal motivations, managed incompetently.
In their continuing incompetence, they now know that they've got to put out a second story, and there's no Reason to believe this story any more than the first one.
There's no reason to believe anything they ever say about anything internationally.
There was no reason to believe the version that they put out about Benghazi.
There was no reason to believe them when they said that there was a line in the sand in Syria if nuclear weapons were used.
There was no reason to believe them when they said if Russia tries to annex Crimea, there will be serious consequences.
Everything they say about an international event is stated on the basis of what they think is going to work at the time.
Interestingly, none of the rhetoric ever works.
So now we're supposed to believe this while I don't believe it.
So then what was the motivation?
Why'd Obama do it?
Dan Heninger, who I just love, he's the Thursday columnist, Wall Street Journal.
He has a really good piece today in which he speculates on the Obama motivations.
And he says the reason we have to speculate about what Obama's motives are is we actually have a foreign policy that no one can figure out.
Whether you are running a foreign policy that is hard line, soft line, accommodationist, confrontational, say the contrast between Nixon's foreign policy, Ford's foreign policy, the Jimmy Carter appeasement foreign policy, or the Reagan confrontational, you always kind of knew where they were coming from.
Heninger points out, it's been very unclear where Obama's coming from.
They never really state what their goals are.
They never state what the end game is.
They never state what the MO is.
Instead, it just goes wandering around out there.
All of this, however, ducks the one big question asked of any modern president's foreign policy.
What exactly do you guys stand for?
What when you've left the building with the United States represent?
After more than five years of Obama foreign policy, what we've got is a huge fuzzball of good intentions.
It doesn't stand for anything.
Not a strategy, not a set of identifiable ideas, no real doctrine, and not much to show for whatever it is.
Barack Obama in the world resembles Casper the Friendly Ghost.
With the U.S. rule fading in and out of view as is his wont.
Hillary Clinton few a mil flew a million miles as Secretary of State with no evident concept of what she was doing or why.
John Kerry endlessly slips in and out of capitals talking.
This they say is smart power.
Smart power just sprung, a volunteer POW named Sergeant Bo Bergdahl for five stone killer Taliban.
No one in the White House, including as always Susan Rice, can give an adequate explanation for what this was all about.
Only the president knows.
That may work for him.
But for everyone else in an unsettled world, not so well.
That's Dan Heninger's take on the Wall Street Journal.
Nobody knows what Obama thinks.
Nobody knows what Obama's goal is.
We have a foreign policy that's impossible to define.
As much as I respect Hininger, I disagree with him.
I think I know Obama's motives.
I think this deal, this Bergdahl for five Taliban is very easy to figure out.
I think the President of the United States wants Gitmo to be gone by the time he leaves office.
He's embarrassed he hasn't been able to close it.
So if we can get rid of five more five people right now, go ahead and do it.
As for releasing Bergdahl and putting these Taliban back into the free world, he's never bought into the war on terror other than when it served his political purposes.
This is his way of weakening the war on terror and emptying out Getmo.
And Bo Bergdahl was merely the tool, the excuse to do what he wanted to do.
All right, I'll I've got to have some rationalization to start emptying Getmo.
I want to dump out five of them right now.
Oh, let's use Bo Bergdahl.
I'll claim I'm rescuing him.
That's what this is all about.
He doesn't like holding people in Guantanamo because he doesn't believe on the war on the war on terror, and he's not worried about putting Taliban into the world because he isn't particularly concerned about the terror threat.
Anyway, my name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush.
Time to talk to the folks.
1-800-282, two eight eight two is the Rush Limbaugh number when Russia's here or when one of us guestos is here, send him to call in on.
Again, my take on the Bergdahl for Taliban story is that the President of the United States has never fully bought in to the war on terror.
He doesn't care about it.
He doesn't like the notion that the United States is supposed to be the policeman of the world.
He's not all that bothered by Islamist extremism.
He's felt the ability to deal with evil forces in the world.
He thinks he can talk to them and work it through.
As for Guantanamo, when he ran for office, he ridiculed the fact that it was there.
He and the left, and he is a man of the hard left.
He and the left despise the fact that we are holding those people in Guantanamo without a trial.
They think it is terrible.
Yet for political reasons, he hasn't figured out how he can end Guantanamo.
He hasn't been able to move them to any federal prison in any state because no one wants them.
He can't get away with releasing them because even members of his own party will disagree with that because he realizes that they're dangerous.
So they sit there.
He said he'd have Guantanamo closed within a year.
It's not a year.
It's five and a half years right now.
And he's approaching the end of his term.
He wants Guantanamo not to be there.
He wants Get Mo done.
So this was an opportunity to weaken the war on terror that he doesn't care about and start to deal with his Guantanamo problem.
I don't think you can analyze anything that Obama does without getting into motivations because his motivation is different from that of every other president we've had.
Every other president pursues things on the basis of what they think is good for the United States and its interests.
Wrongly, in the case of Carter and Clinton, correctly in the case of Reagan, mixed in the case of Nixon.
In the case, however, Roosevelt, Truman, you can go through all of them.
In Obama's case, he doesn't motivate him.
He's not motivated by what's in the best interest of the United States.
He's motivated by the way he thinks that thinks things ought to be done.
And he's not all that big on the United States throwing its weight around in the world.
So therefore, American interests are never his number one priority.
Time to talk to the folks.
Let's go to Columbus, Ohio, and Dave.
Dave you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
The the saddest thing for me about this whole Bergdahl affair is what Obama, and this is Obama's deal.
He can't blame anybody else on this.
But the saddest part of this whole Bergdahl situation, this trade was made where a deserter and a possibly a trader was exchanged for five terrorists who are going to go out and hurt Americans in the future.
But the saddest thing is that this represents the greatest accomplishment and achievement of Barack Obama's foreign policy.
There's nothing else that he's done that's I mean, the deal that he's negotiating with Iran is even worse than this Bergdahl deal.
Well, and he doesn't even really have that deal.
You make a r that's a good point, Dave.
You're pointing out that Obama can point to foreign policy achievement, whether you agree with it or not, and he has nothing.
He now can at least say he negotiated this.
He hasn't been able to negotiate any treaty between the Palestinians and the Israelis.
He hasn't been able to reach any kind of accommodation to stop Putin from doing whatever it is that Putin wants to do.
He hasn't been able to announce a formalized deal and he finished deal with Iran.
You're right.
He can claim this.
So your point is as bad as as this deal is, it's the first thing in five and a half years that we can point to that happened foreign policy-wise under Barack Obama.
And what we need is we need a moratorium on President Obama and Kerry doing anything on behalf of America unless the Senate is allowed to advise and consent.
The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations has to advise and consent.
And we we Americans need this has President Obama to stand down.
You are not going to do anything else to hurt us unless a bipartisan review of anything that you want to do, you or Kerry, anything you want to do should have to be approved by the Senate elections committee.
The sad part about all of this for me is that I do believe in the power of a strong executive when it comes to running foreign policy.
I made that argument for eight years of Bush.
I even made the argument when Clinton was president and his foreign policy was nothing to write home about.
It's hard for me to think that you can run a coherent foreign policy when you go every bring everything through a committee, and that's all the Congress is.
The problem, of course, here is that if Obama had actually gone and consulted the Senate, they probably would have told him not to do it.
He there were these apologies that they offered.
Well, maybe we should have consulted somebody over here or somebody over there.
The reason they didn't consult the Senate, the reason they didn't even consult Democrats in the Senate like Feinstein is they would have been told that this is a bad thing to do.
See, he wanted to do it.
If you go back to my point about motivation, he wants to start emptying Getmo.
Well, even Democrats aren't all that sold on that.
He didn't consult with anybody because he didn't want to be told no.
Yes, it is the Rush Limbar program, but no rush this week.
The good news is no medical stuff, nothing with the year or anything.
Rush is actually on vacation, which he deserves.
But you can always catch up with Rush.
Rush Limbaugh.com.
While you're there, you can join Rush 24-7 so that you can watch Rush on the Ditto Cam and get podcasts of this radio show.
Do they podcast me?
My part of the podcasts?
Yes.
No ditto cam for me, though.
Yeah, no kidding.
I mean, I saw that thing in here and I was terrified the first time.
I was gonna hang my jacket over the top of it.
You may want to see Rush doing the program.
You don't want to see this.
1-800-282-2882, the phone number, I think.
Victory, Texas, Nick, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program with guest host Mark Delling.
Hey, it's Victoria, Texas.
Good morning.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
That's okay.
Um first thing I wanted to say was uh you in your previous conversation, you you hit the nail on the head when you said uh that the president did this uh release swap uh prisoner swap.
Well, he did it on a Saturday when no one thought no one would really notice what was going on, but he did it uh because he knew that if he went through Congress, he would have got uh shut down on that, which is what he does all the time.
He circumvents the system uh when he realizes that uh he's not gonna get his way, and he does so with uh without any repercussions or accountability.
But that's the only the only accountability really is is that he's now being criticized for this.
But the farther he gets into his term and the more lame duck he is, the less I think that that matters to him.
I think what matters to him, he's got a few things that he wants to get done before his presidency is over, and Guantanamo as a detention center for terrorists is getting rid of that is one of them.
And I, you know, you can say, well, this is only five, okay, five down, a hundred and forty-five or whatever it is still to go.
I think that's what drives all of this, and everything else is part of facilitating this.
That's why the trade was so bad.
I'm sure the Taliban would have traded Bergdahl for two or three of their people.
They'd be glad to get any of them back.
Look at how they're crowing about this.
This Taliban video that was released yesterday in which they show the hero's welcome that they're all receiving.
Obama, I think is the one that added to the number.
That's why the trade was as bad as it was.
Anyway, you said you had another point you wanted to make, Nick.
Yeah, the point he made a statement earlier today that uh, you know, this is just another conspiracy, whipped up in Washington and and uh no big surprise, it's part for the course.
And he said, but I want to reiterate my previous statement that uh, you know, we have an obligation, and we do not leave anyone behind wearing the uniform.
And I just want to state this guy wasn't wearing a uniform.
He ditched his uniform.
And he's not only is he uh a deserter, but he's a defector.
He didn't leave his post.
He left his post willingly, but he didn't go away from the combatants.
He went over to their side.
I th this is what a number of people who served with him are claiming.
Now, obviously, I don't know.
I wasn't there, but uh Sergeant Bethea wrote a piece uh boy, I wish I remember where his piece was.
I think it was it wasn't on Huffington Post, it was somewhere.
Uh Daily Beast, in which he chronicled the efforts that were made to try to rescue Bergdahl and the claims that a number of Americans were killed in the process.
Whether or not Bergdahl defected, Bergdahl was airheaded and walked away, whether or not Bergdahl wandered away with the intention of coming back and just needed a break.
I don't know the answers to any of those things.
What we do know, though, is that this was not a guy that was captured during combat.
He was not captured on base.
It was not cat, he was not captured when he was anywhere that he was supposed to be.
Still, I do accept the notion that we try to bring our own people back, if for no other reason than to try him according to our standards rather than to hold him captive.
I understand that it is a noble goal, whether Bergdahl is a hero or not, to bring him back.
I get that point.
But I don't think I would have done this even if this was someone for whom there weren't all of these questions.
Let's imagine that it isn't Bergdahl and it's not even a member of the military.
It's an innocent American civilian who's grabbed up in Afghanistan, he's working for a defense contract or something, grabbed up by the Taliban.
I wouldn't make the trade then.
The problem with any of these trades is that you become begin the process of negotiating with terrorists.
We always say we don't negotiate with terrorists.
Well, that's what we just did.
We negotiated with terrorists.
And in so doing, we make all Americans abroad at greater risk.
This backfires from the perspective of how do we stop Americans from being targeted?
This backfires from the perspective of what's in the interest of the soldiers that are serving right now, particularly in Afghanistan.
If we've now established that one American, never mind whether or not Bergdahl was a deserter or not, one American is worth five Taliban.
The Taliban can count, grab 30 more Americans and all of their people are back home.
If the role of the United States is going to be that if you grab an American and an American is in jeopardy, we're going to turn loose everyone that we capture.
Why wouldn't more people be captured?
It's not just the Taliban.
The Islamist, not Islamic, Islamist.
That's the movement of Islam that believes in jihad.
If the Islamist movement is everywhere on the globe right now, they're not only all over Afghanistan and Iran, they're not only active in Iraq, they're everywhere in Pakistan.
They're all over Syria.
They're crawling all over the Middle East.
How about Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria?
Boko Haramda, should I remind you of what they've been pulling off?
And then Europe.
Almost all of the major cities of Europe, there are enormous pockets of is of the Islamist movement.
Any American moving freely in any of those places is now at greater risk.
There isn't much point in grabbing, and we certainly know that Americans have been taken in the past by terrorists.
We all have seen the terrible videos of the people with the bags over their heads who are forced to make awful statements and then are later killed.
If you want that to continue, if you want more Americans to be grabbed, then reward the grabbing.
That's what we've done here.
The reason that we state we don't negotiate with terrorists is we don't want to validate the actions of the terrorists.
We don't want to reward them for what they've done.
We just rewarded the Taliban.
We just told the Taliban that if we have something that you want, the way that you can get something from us is to grab an American.
We've got Americans everywhere in the world.
The terrorists are now walking about.
That's why I think it was a grave policy mistake.
Obama can sell this any way he wants.
I believe, and maybe I'm wrong, but I believe that this is all about getting rid of the Guantanamo problem and secondarily, getting out of Afghanistan.
Obama has said over and over and over, we're out of Afghanistan by 2016.
I know a lot of the Rush audience isn't familiar with all my views on everything.
I've never been a big fan of the war in Afghanistan, and I wasn't a huge fan of it when President Bush was in office.
I felt that the need to go into Afghanistan was to get al Qaeda out of there.
They were operating as a safe haven with the permission of the Taliban government which ran Afghanistan.
Once that was accomplished, I don't know that it was ever that big of a deal, whether or not the Taliban or anybody else ran Afghanistan.
I just didn't want Al Qaeda being able to use it as a headquarters as a safe zone.
But that's my opinion.
So I've never been a huge cheerleader of the whole notion of the war in Afghanistan.
Nonetheless, Obama wants out.
The only reason we've been in Afghanistan as long as we've been is when he was running for president.
He needed a reason, he needed a rationale to attack the war on Iraq.
So he said the war on Iraq was distracting attention from the real war that mattered, Afghanistan.
So now he's all in in Afghanistan, and ever since he became president, Afghanistan, which was essentially won by Bush, hasn't been in the process of being lost by Obama.
We've changed policy, we've changed the MO so many different times that nobody even knows what the goal over there is.
What is the goal in Afghanistan?
We've never stated it.
Was it to keep the Taliban out of power permanently?
Was it to have the Karzai government permanently established?
Was it to simply create peace?
Was it to make sure that Al Qaeda would never come back in?
We've never stated any goals there.
So he wants to be out.
He hasn't figured out what the end game is, but he needs to be out.
So if he needs to be out, how can he leave in 2016 without making it look like he's walked away and left a mess behind?
He needs to negotiate an end.
How do you negotiate an end?
You cut a deal with the Taliban.
Something that Obama can sell and say we are leaving Afghanistan honorably, and we've achieved our goals.
So in addition to the fact that he's emptying out Guantanamo, he's begun this process of talking to and working with the Taliban.
This gives him an exit strategy for Afghanistan.
A war that he doesn't want to fight, and a war that he is determined to will end when he's president.
I think Obama can't stand the fact that under his watch we fought a war for eight years.
That's what Afghanistan is, a war.
And he can't stand the fact that he wasn't able to get rid of Guantanamo.
You take those two things, and this is why I say it's so critical to understand the Obama motivation in analyzing any of it.
He wants out of Afghanistan by cutting a deal with the Taliban, and he wants to get rid of the Guantanamo problem.
Therefore, we cut an unbelievably stupid deal, bringing back Bergdahl and releasing five terrorists, making Americans less safe anywhere in the world that Islamists are because we've just established what the rules are.
We will release your bad guys.
We'll do whatever you want so long as you give back people that you have that belong to us.
Well, I guess they're going to grab up a lot of Americans.
This deal is terrible.
It endangers every American who is anywhere where they can be a target.
And it was all done because the president of the United States wants out of Afghanistan and wants Guantanamo closed.
My opinion.
Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Mark Belling on EIB.
Work with me on this.
One of the reasons you don't negotiate with terrorists is it legitimizes them.
You cut a deal with someone, you're in at least one fashion, giving them giving them standing and status.
This negotiation, this deal legitimizes the Taliban.
The Taliban cut a deal with the United States of America.
Again, I think he wants to legitimize the Taliban because he wants to cut a deal that ends the war in Afghanistan.
It'll be a terrible deal.
It'll be terrible terms.
They'll be violated instantly.
But that's what he wants.
And again, I don't think you can deal with any foreign policy decision of the United States without examining the motivation behind the president.
And those motivations, I think, deal with his being a person strongly of the left, who's never believed in the notion of a strong America, has never bought into the notion of a war on terror, and certainly doesn't believe in holding terrorists without a trial.
Back to the phones.
Liberty Pennsylvania and Rick, Rick, you're on EIV with Mark Belling.
Hi, Mark.
Uh I think there's actually a political aspect to this as well from a uh, you know, an American political.
I think he's actually trying to goad the Republicans who he sees as feckless and impotent.
I think he's trying to go to them into a impeachment.
I think he's basically gone the route.
He thinks he can do whatever he wants.
You know, he can skip whatever law, ignore whatever law, and basically act as a dictator.
And the Republicans aren't going to do anything.
So he'll make whatever deal he wants until he actually gets some pushback.
And if he actually does get some pushback, well, then he can try and use that to garner someone.
Well, we do know the war he likes to fight.
He likes to war with Republicans.
That's the you know, that's the real enemy.
That's who he most despises.
So I'll grant you that.
I do want to quarrel with one point that you that you make, though, that he can do whatever he wants.
In fact, if he could do whatever he wanted, I think he would have r bailed out of Afghanistan prior to this.
If he could do whatever he wanted, he would have just closed Getmo the instant he came into office.
There are some political realities that have impeded him, including the fact that there are a lot of Democrats, especially swing state Democrats, who can't let him be as radical as he would like to be.
The reason he couldn't close Guantanamo is he couldn't find any state that was a with a federal prison or a detention facility that wanted to have those inmates.
He couldn't he couldn't bring them back to the United States because a lot of Democrats were saying, look, you bring these people here and they get out, we're going to have a political disaster for you.
You release them, which is what he wants to do, and they come back and they commit an act of terror, it will damage our party.
He's been constrained to some extent by what Democrats would find acceptable.
That even his apologists on the left, there's only so far that he can go before doing things that would turn them against him.
He's farther to the left than a lot of the people who are on his own side.
So he hasn't been able to do everything that he's wanted to do.
This is why he did this in the fashion that he did.
He was able to make a step toward reaching a level of acceptable status for the Taliban.
And you don't talk to somebody unless they're at least acceptable enough to speak to.
He was able to do that, and he was able to get rid of five Get Mo detainees, and in doing so, he had to go around Democrat senators.
But understand, even they are squawking.
Diane Feinstein's been in the Senate for about 852 years.
She believes in all this senatorial prerogative and power and advise and consent and all of that.
She's hacked off that they didn't go, that the president didn't go to the Senate and advise them of what they're doing.
So he can't do everything that he wants to do, but he's determined to do as much of what he wants to do, if that makes any sense.
I'm Mark Elling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh, Westchester, New York.
Andrea, it's your turn on EIB.
Hey there.
I'm not in Westchester, California, though.
No, you're not.
You don't think so.
I didn't catch that.
What would you say, Andrea?
Oh, sorry, I'm in Westchester, California.
Oh, can I see that's what you're saying?
No kidding, it's your fault.
H.R. who is doing the call screening said that's my fault.
He put Westchester, New York on there.
You're right, it's his it's your fault.
Anyway, Andrea, sorry.
Westchester, California, what's on your mind?
No, it's on my mind is what you said.
I was thinking about it and taking a step further.
I think Obama knows just what he's doing.
And who's to say he's not strategizing with the Taliban, simply telling them informing him of his desire to close Guantanamo and inviting them to continue with, oh, let's capture another American.
Let's find somebody else.
Let's start it.
Well, if you're the tele if you're the Taliban, why wouldn't you interpret it that way?
If the Taliban want their people back, they just figured out how to do it.
The Taliban, if probably wanted those Guantanamo people back all along, a lot of them are guan uh our Taliban, some are Al Qaeda.
They know how to get their people back, grah have Americans as bargaining chips.
Uh yet whether or not it was stated publicly or not, that's what the impact of it was, Andre, and you're exactly right about that.
That's why this is so damaging to Americans.
It's why I make the point that never mind Bergdahl's status, whether or not he's a deserter or not, and there's compelling evidence that he did indeed walk away.
A lot of people who served with him said that he did.
Even if Bergdahl were someone that was an honorable person that was a true victim, cutting deals with groups like the Taliban to release people like this, merely encourage the taking of future hostages.
Then you've got the whole impact of what happens by sending these People back.
Now they're supposed to stay in Qatar for a year.
Yeah, good luck on that.
Imagine what's going to happen when these people get back to Afghanistan.
Already the Taliban has a video out in which they are bragging and crowing, claiming that this is a tremendous day.
They feel legitimized.
They're bragging to the Afghan world.
This has got to terrify everyone in Afghanistan who worked with the United States.
They see A, we're going to leave, and B, it looks like the Taliban and these guys are coming back.
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