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June 6, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:36
June 6, 2014, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Yes, I'm filling in.
Not only is today the last day of Russia's vacation, that means he will be back, refreshed and raring to go on Monday's program.
It is Friday, and that means that it's open line Friday, and I'm not going to break tradition.
Today will be open line Friday.
But we're going to put that in hold for a bit at the beginning of the program today.
You always run the risk of being trite, condescending.
When you talk about an anniversary of an event like D Day.
First of all, everybody's doing it.
Today's the 70th anniversary of D-Day.
The coverage is all over all of the cable networks.
Most newspapers, even the liberal ones have something in the paper.
Obama's over there along with the European leaders.
There are a lot of things that are said.
And they're often the same things that are said every day, D-Day anniversary, especially the big ones, the ones that come on the round numbers every five years, in this case, 70 years on the dot.
The challenge in talking about something like a D-Day anniversary is to not just say the same old stuff with insincerity.
Yet it has to be talked about.
I think about what happened on that day...
And it's almost like it could not have happened.
That it's miraculous.
But then all of World War II was miraculous.
World War II, in the way it was fought, will never happen again.
We may well have a World War III, and we may well have carnage, but we won't have that type of war again.
There are a lot of us, people of my generation, and I'm a baby boomer, who have read all the books.
There have been cable channels that exist almost solely just to show all this old World War II battle footage.
The history channel, the military channel.
Those channels, I mean, they just thrive on World War II this, World War II that, the movies that have been done, the TV miniseries that have been done, the books, so many books.
We eat all of it up.
I think some people look the other way and don't want to think about it, but there is an entire culture built around learning about World War II.
First of all, it's a story with a happy ending, so we like that.
It's not like we're reading about Vietnam, a war that ended with the vagueness that we had there.
World War II was an example of good triumphing over evil, and Americans making the ultimate sacrifice for a greater good, so it's a pleasant story, knowing that the outcome is good.
Still, the things that happened in World War II are not like anything that has happened in my lifetime.
The wars that we have fought in our nation when I've been here were either extremely controversial, like Vietnam, rapid fire like the first Gulf War, again controversial with a vague ending, the war on Iraq, the current situation in Afghanistan, a president of the United States half-heartedly fighting it.
World War II was this ultimate American commitment.
I can't imagine anything that would like other than maybe a player strike stopping sports seasons.
Some of them were suspended.
Major League Baseball kept playing, but with depleted rosters.
The men folk, they were mostly gone, other than those that were too old, or were able to stay behind because their families needed them, or had a physical impairment.
It was a national obsession for years, and I just can't imagine anything like that happening again because I've never seen it in my lifetime, but then you realize World War II happened.
Only a few years before most of us baby boomers were born.
If we have a hard time imagining it, think about the Generation Xers or the Millennials.
I would think some somebody 23 years old hearing about World War II.
It's like hearing about the Civil War, the revolution.
It's so far removed from anyone's experience.
Yet it's there, and it happened in our recent past.
It is critical, I think, that we mentally keep confronting D-Day because the witnesses are virtually gone.
Twenty-two-year-old young man involved in the Normandy invasion would be 92.
I've been watching these D-Day reunions.
I think the 40th was the first really, really big one.
That was the one that Reagan spoke at if memory serves.
And you saw so many of the proud veterans who served, family members of those who died.
And each succeeding reunion, fewer and fewer.
The local TV stations who every couple of years they'll go and find someone who served and was involved in D-Day to interview almost impossible to find.
They are dying off.
And as we lose the witnesses, we lose the people who actually were there.
We lose their only connection to the people who could actually tell us what that experience was like.
Now you can argue that the anniversary of D-Day is too big of a deal is made of it.
There are other landmark events in World War II.
There are other events that were bloody, carnage, great American sacrifice ultimately leading to victory, Guadalcanal in the Pacific, the Battle of the Bulge, which of course happened after D-Day, one of the landmark and defining battles in Europe.
Holding England in 42 and 43 and the massive bombardment that occurred there.
The war in North Africa.
Even Pearl Harbor, that there are a lot of events.
The D-Day, though, event sticks.
First of all, it was the turning point.
But secondly, there is something about it that is just almost imaginable.
This was basic warfare strategy.
Hitler marched all the way across Europe.
He took virtually the entire continent.
He was right there, staring at really all that was left was England, Great Britain.
Divided by the sea, he had virtually everything else.
The Russians were fighting him on the back flank.
And on the front, everyone else had been pushed back.
Pushed away.
He had taken Europe.
And there's only one way to take it back.
You had to go back over to Europe and start shoving him back the other way.
The thing is, as I say, he had Europe.
And he had the coastlines of France and Belgium.
Short of nuclear weapons, which didn't become an option until a year later, the only way to take it back was going to be to invade the European continent from England.
That meant we selected human beings to be human cannon fodder.
Imagine being on those boats or the paratroopers flying over.
Think what was waiting for you.
He had the most amazing job on D-Day.
Died a couple of years ago.
His job on D-Day is he sat on one of the boats that was going back and forth.
His job was to make sure that nobody bailed.
He had orders, he told me, I believe him.
He said, My order were orders were if anybody tried to jump off or rebel or say let's not do this, I was to shoot him.
Imagine having that job.
But that job was necessary.
You couldn't have any cold feet.
You couldn't have anyone saying, no, I'm not going to do it.
And there weren't any.
They all went and they stormed that beach.
Some of the numbers.
Twenty, five hundred Americans died, two thousand from other Allied nations.
Total casualties dead and wounded from the D-Day invasion, estimated at over 10,000.
The numbers can be vague because the fighting obviously went on for several days.
They went in there and they charged those charged those beaches and stormed those hills under massive heavy bombardment.
The ones in the first wave and the second wave.
They knew they may well be killed.
Yet they did it.
This could never happen today.
I think the reason this was able to happen, that the war planners, General Eisenhower, the Allied leaders, Roosevelt, Churchill, De Gaulle.
The reason that they were able to do it is they knew that the American public wouldn't see it.
At least they wouldn't see it in real time.
Maybe there'd be some sanitized newsreel footage a few days later, but they wouldn't see it.
Can you imagine if we saw something like this now?
Can you imagine if we invaded some country or we were involved in some military battle?
Where by the hundreds, our soldiers, marines, airmen were just dying.
Splam, bam, bam.
This was bloody, god awful, unbelievable.
It would have been impossible to watch.
We as a nation get the he be jeebs at the slightest kind of human pain or suffering.
Look at all of the things that we argue are not worth the price.
Think of this price.
But we didn't see it.
And thank God we weren't able to see it because if we were able to see it, I don't think we ever would have done it.
And that's why I don't think World War II or a war like it could ever happen again, nor an invasion like D-Day could ever happen again.
When you really think about it, 70 years.
This was the last big event that our nation had.
There wasn't on television.
Oh, they had TV then, but virtually nobody had it.
They didn't have live coverage.
There wasn't even a lot of news footage.
People saw this in photos in the newspaper the next day, and of the newsreels and the movie theaters a few days after.
And as I say, even then, sanitized, you didn't get the same impact of it.
As for whether or not we could do it now, it isn't just that the American public, I think, couldn't confront seeing it.
Our liberals, our culture, our elitists, they would never have allowed it.
I don't think they would have allowed World War II.
They would have argued that it wasn't worth it.
They would have appeased the Nazis the same way.
They appeased Saddam Hussein.
The way they appease the Iranian nuclear threat, the way they appease the jihadists, the way they even appease Putin.
They would have rationalized and excused and argued that we needed to coexist.
They're beautiful bumper stickers, you see the stickers, war is never the answer.
Oh, really?
Not even World War II.
I guess not.
They would have opposed it.
And they may well have won the argument.
I'd like to share some thoughts on why I think that is.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm filling in for Rush Limbaugh.
Mark Belling in for Rush.
We're going to have an open line Friday today, but here in the first segment, the first couple of segments of the program, I want to focus on the D-Day Anniversary because I think it's just so important to do so.
The phone number on the Rush program is 1-800-282-2882.
I made the comment going into the break that our liberals of today would not have fought World War II.
They like to claim that the wars that we've been involved in since didn't have the same meaning or the same import.
Those are just rationalizations.
They would have been against this one too.
a lot of Americans at the time were.
The British didn't fight World War II until the British were attacked.
Neville Chamberlain cut his deal with Hitler, came back, proclaimed that he had found peace in our time.
Trusted Hitler in the same way that our lefties want to trust everyone else.
They don't believe that the only way to stop evil is to kill it.
They would have opposed this war in the same way that they oppose all wars.
They would have argued that it wasn't worth fighting, but D-Day proves that there are people who think that there are things worth dying for.
That there is a greater good.
Imagine being twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three years old.
Your entire future ahead of you.
Give it all up to die in all of that gunfire.
And believe that you were doing the right thing, sacrificing your own life and moving on for some larger cause.
It's a cause that people believed in.
I think our liberals are incapable of thinking any cause is worth that because they're incapable of thinking that we could ever be morally right enough to decide that cause.
First couple of years of World War II after Pearl Harbor, they're bad.
42 and 43 didn't go well.
people.
We held the line at 42 was losses, 43, we kind of held the line.
44, we turned it around and made the invasion.
There was a parallel track going on in the Pacific.
We would have bailed on this.
My grandmother kept a scrapbook.
She was one of those old ladies that clipped everything out.
I remember when I was a kid.
I go and I look at her scrapbooks.
They were filled with World War II stuff.
And it was almost all.
We came from a community of what ten or twelve thousand.
I'm from the Fox Valley of Wisconsin.
Bunch of small cities stuck together, one another.
Our city was ten or twelve thousand, neighboring cities five or six thousand, big town was Appleton.
She clipped out all the clippings of people that she or her family knew who died during the war.
It was page after page after page of them.
I'm sitting there reading through these things as a kid.
Wow, all these people died in this war.
She saved all those clippings.
Those people in their sacrifice.
Tom Brokoff wrote the book in which he coined the term the greatest generation.
Well, they probably were.
I compare them with, I know it's an unfair comparison and it's not fair to him, but compare them with Bergdahl.
Compare them with the Occupy movement.
Those self-indulgent spoiled brats who decided to camp out in parks, claiming that they were fighting for a greater good.
All they were fighting for was the right not to take a bath.
Compare them with me.
Like many of my generation, I came around after the draft was over.
I never served.
Most people like me.
Scared of seeing a couple of rats running across the street.
Imagine dealing with what those people dealt with.
They certainly have done more than I ever have.
Or to be honest, most of you ever did.
It was an unbelievable sacrifice that occurred, and there were battles that were fought D-Day the one we focus on today, that were so unbelievably savagely bloody that were necessary in order to achieve this victory.
We take it for granted for the same reason that it happened in the first place.
We didn't really see it.
I would recommend to you a couple of movies.
The mini-series on HBO that Spielberg and Hanks did, Band of Brothers, which followed one company through World War II, including D-Day.
Brilliant.
I think the visuals tell you what it was like.
The companion piece that came out a couple of years ago called The Pacific about the war in the Pacific, really good miniseries that I think personified was a good personification of the people involved and gave you a feeling of what it was like being there.
We need to know what it was there because it's a remarkable moment in human history.
Seventy years ago today, D-Day.
Halfway back.
That's kind of amazing, really.
1979 is the midway point between right now and going back to D-Day.
Seventy years, yet it seems to be in a different almost universe.
Terms of what our country is now like.
We're going to go to the phones.
Colts Neck, New Jersey, and Linda.
Linda, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Wow, I waited 15 years.
This is my lucky day.
I think we should play the lottery.
I'm so happy to speak to you.
Yeah, this this day and World War II holds a special place of my heart.
My grandfather, I even get choked up talking about it.
My grandfather um drove the um the boats, the the land I don't even know what they call it, the boats that went from the big ship into the uh shore.
And from a young child, it was ingrained into us these stories, and only as we got older we really appreciated them, but we were able to pass them on to our children, and he used to tell us horrific stories of the sacrifice of these young he was four years old.
He enlisted in the Navy, he had his captain's license, and they took him right away, and all the young men were already drafted, and he would have to actually convince the guys to get off the boat because they would like hold on and say, Harry, I don't want to get off.
And he'd say, You have to fight for your country, be a man.
So and it just to this day, it breaks my heart to think about the sacrifice of these men and women.
But look look at what we got.
We got the world.
We got we we we got the freedom of this country to even be speaking about this right now.
And the only other time that I think in my lifetime that I uh experienced this was after 9-11.
My husband was involved in the 9-11 trade center.
Mm-hmm.
Tragedy, and he did survive, which I'm very happy to say.
Um, but I did find that it was one time in my lifetime that it was sort of everybody came together.
There's a lot of uh national camaraderie, and we all we all stuck together as Americans.
And I love that feeling.
911 was an attack on our soil.
World War II was different, true.
The Japanese did attack us at Pearl Harbor, but in a way that just seemed different to people because you know, Hawaii wasn't even a state then, it was an American military base out in the Pacific, Hawaii was still a territory.
9-11 happened on our soil.
The difference, of course, between 9-11 is the Islamist terrorist movement is a vague enemy.
This was a nation, this was Germany and its Axis allies, and it was a nation Germany that was pushing forward and was prevailing.
It was a very, very different thing.
Furthermore, a lot of the Americans who did come together on 9-11, you had this sense, well, we can handle an al-Qaeda.
I think even then we were a little naive as to how difficult it would be to handle a movement as horrible as that movement.
But to think on the challenge of taking on Germany, Germany seemed invincible at the time.
And it wasn't, you know, we're a nation that wants quick results.
They were in the instant 24-hour news cycle right now.
You went two, two and a half years before we had made really full progress.
HR points out that there were terrible intelligence failures.
Guns weren't where we thought they were.
Our soldiers who landed, they often landed where they weren't supposed to.
The paratroopers, there were heavy winds that day.
They were blown off course.
It was a big cluster screw up, is what it was.
They went over there and there was a lot of fighting and lacking total coordination, they had to Persist and prevail, it's remarkable they weren't turned back.
But they sustained and they moved forward.
They were the historians claimed tactical errors made by the Germans who essentially started to retreat rather than hold the line right at the beach that some say that that was a mistake.
Still, we did all of that, and you mentioned the experience of, I think you said your grandfather.
His job was to make sure they got off the boats.
Imagine that job, telling all of these people, get off, you have to do it, you have to do it, you have to do it.
He knew the impact of what he was telling them.
Get off, you have to do this, even though you may well die.
There have been so many of those veterans who, when they came back, have been reticent.
I mean, you see all of the interviews in which none of them really like to talk about their own exploits, and they say, well, yes, I serve, but the real hero was, and then they'll mention someone who passed away in their service.
They were reticent and they didn't want to draw attention to what they did.
I almost kind of wish they bragged a little bit more and told the tale and let everybody know exactly what it was like.
Instead, they felt as though they did their duty and then they came back home and then they screwed everything up because they gave birth to us selfish baby boomers.
But their act of selflessness and what happened in World War II and especially Omaha Beach and the other landing sites, it's just an extraordinary story.
Thank you for the call, Linda.
Let's go to uh John in Houston.
It's your turn on the EIB network with Mark Belling.
Mark, uh, I'm a son of a World War II veteran who's eighty-eight now.
He joined on his seventeenth birthday in nineteen forty-two in the U.S. Coast Guard, later served in uh convoy escort duty in the Atlantic.
But uh I I was uh a baby boomer.
I was in the last draft of Vietnam, I didn't serve, I went on and uh became a physician.
But after 911, I was so uh affected by that attack that I went to a recruiter and was uh commissioned as a medical officer after 911 and was within a year I was uh put on active duty to go into Iraq during the invasion.
And I the whole reason why I did it was because I felt the same thing that they felt after Pearl Harbor that this was gonna be something big.
And then we got there and uh uh captured Baghdad, and then it just the mission changed.
And yeah, it it is a different thing.
9-11, I think was similar in terms of the kind of unification of American spirit, but it was really the war in Iraq and the fight in the war on terror so dramatically different.
I think, you know, if there were only a way that we could have one great storming of the beach to get rid of the Islamist terrorist threat once and for all, unfortunately, that isn't possible.
They aren't all lodged in one place in the same way that the Nazis were or the Japanese were in the Pacific.
It was a different kind of thing.
I just think back to the determination uh that was made on that battle plan and they they decided, you know, trying to guard their secrets, the timing, no one was supposed to find out about it, that when we were going to move, the weather was miserable that day, but still this was the day of the plan.
It was a go to go ahead and do that is just really, really something that you think back about and you wonder how they would have could they have pulled it off.
It's an easy comparison and an easy shot to say, well, Barack Obama would not have done.
Well, he wouldn't have done anything that virtually any president would have done.
Barack Obama's notion of a foreign policy is is to not think about wins and losses but manage your way through the day, and we can't define things in terms of good and evil, and who are we to say and all that.
I think of any president after that that would have had to make these decisions and fight through.
We hear stories about how Johnson was just driven to almost depression over the fact that Vietnam was not working out.
Eisenhower's decision to essentially pull the plug on Korea and end our involvement there.
And Eisenhower was someone who, you know, led the war effort in World War II, pressing forward in the fashion that they did, and as many Americans fighting in the way that they did, and the nation being behind it all the way through, and being behind it after they learned of this invasion and they learned of the death toll.
But as I say, I think it really helped that we didn't have a 24 hour news cycle, that we didn't have full reporting on how many screw ups occurred that day, and that we didn't actually have to see with our own eyes what happened.
We're changed, and a lot of things I think have changed us because of technology attitudes and everything else.
In a way, we're very, very fortunate that Adolf Hitler didn't come around twenty years later.
Because had he done so, I don't know that the world would have had the resolve or the guts of the stomach to stand up to someone as evil as he.
Chicago and Fred, you're on EIB with Mark Belling.
Yeah, I don't know where you've studied history, but America was extremely isolationist, did not want to enter the war, and Republicans fought entering the war and their conservative colleagues uh all the way up until the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
That's what got us in.
Well, there were a lot there there were a lot of I uh I I don't a whole country was because they left World War One.
Yeah, there was there was a strong sense of Freddy's Fred uh I think I acknowledge that.
There was a strong sense of isolationism in the United States, and there are you know, we didn't enter until we were hit by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor.
To this day there are some, and sadly they're on the right, who argue that we should not have entered World War II.
The point I make about today's contemporary liberals is they never seem to find a fight worth fighting.
They never seem to be worth fighting.
Pardon me?
Name one that was worth fighting for World War II.
World War II.
Since World War II, name one that was fighting since World War II.
The current ongoing war against Islamists who want to kill people because they are not of the proper religion.
Their left is all for it.
They've been all for it.
I don't know of anybody who's against it on the left.
The war on terror?
They supported both wars in Iraq?
Iraq was worthless against the war on terror.
That was just a bunch of if you remember started on a bunch of baloney about weapons of mass destruction which weren't there.
The point that the point that I'm making is is that we can argue there's no way of proving it, that today's average American warmed over lefty, had they been moved back in time and through an accident of birth been born earlier, would have supported World War II.
There's nothing in their psyche and nothing in their background to indicate that they would have done so, that they would have made the excuses that you make now about contemporary wars, that there would have always been a reason not to do so.
The point that I make is that we had in our nation once the war started, and you are right.
There was an isolationist streak in the United States.
It was primarily on the right.
You say Republican, it was mostly right.
Republican and Democrat weren't as clearly defined as liberal and conservative in that time, but it was on the right.
It was an isolationist streak.
But once the war started, the country was overwhelmingly united behind it, and we didn't get weak knees.
We didn't demand that we come home, we didn't demand instant results.
We instead had a nation in which women who never had worked outside the home in their lives went to work in the factories because the men were off fighting the war.
We had people putting up with the knowledge.
There are families, two, three, four, five brothers were serving in combat.
Women went over and served in support roles as nurses and as support personnel.
It was fully committed.
I just can't see it happening now.
As for my knock on the left and what they would have done had they been around today, my experience with liberals is that there's never a cause worth fighting for.
Your own statement, well, name one since World War II that would have been worth fighting for.
All I can say is that I suspect that that would have been the same thing we would have heard from those folks during World War II, World War I, Civil War, and so on.
They're the ones that claim that war is never the answer.
They are the ones that think that evil can be negotiated with and appeased and dealt with and managed as opposed to destroyed.
Thank you for the call.
I'm Mark Belling and I'm in for Rush Limbaugh.
Mark Belling in for Rush on this 70th anniversary of D-Day, the day in which the Allies decided that they were not going to let the German takeover of the European continent stand.
We're thinking back about that moment and I'm offering the commentary that it seems almost implausible that it could have happened so recently because nothing like it has really happened in the United States since.
We are, starting with hour number two, going to have a normal good all open line Friday and I have a stack of stuff today that's going to rival the rest of Rush's stack of stuff.
The position that I throw out that...
last caller obviously didn't like that today's liberals, today's moral relativists could never have fit in back then is based on my observation that they never seem to think that there's a cause worth fighting and dying for, and maybe they're right.
Maybe in the overall scheme of things, the lefties have had it right all along.
Maybe we didn't need to confront Saddam, maybe we didn't need to be involved in Vietnam.
I've got grave doubts about that one myself.
Maybe the war on terror and the war in Afghanistan, maybe it's all a waste, and maybe all of these wars are utterly meaningless.
But we do know this.
We know that Adolf Hitler and his Axis allies were ultimately evil.
You know, people have argued that, well, Hitler, the moral imperative was so strong that we had to do something.
It wasn't such a moral imperative when we got involved in the war.
The last caller is correct.
America was a reluctant joiner of the war until we were attacked.
We didn't know about the concentration camps until the end of the war.
They weren't really discovered until 1945.
We didn't know exactly how much horror was going on in occupied Europe, the enslavement of Catholics, gypsies, Jews.
We didn't know about much of any of that because it wasn't like there was a free press there able to tell us this was all occupied territory under the control of the Nazis.
The true horror of Hitler wasn't fully revealed until after the war was over.
How would the world have been had I meant I I often think, what would have happened if D-Day hadn't worked?
If we were repelled, they turned us back.
Would the Allies have regrouped five minute months later and tried it again?
Or would there have been a peace deal?
England got to stay free and the Germans got everything else.
Who knows?
We do know this, though.
Because so many Americans were willing to die.
When is the death toll in World War II?
Five hundred thousand?
The numbers in my head.
Just so unbelievably high the casualty rate, those wounded victims, so staggeringly high because they were willing to fight.
Human history, Western civilization, was permanently changed.
I think a lot of people, in our own self-worshiping ourselves and our own exaggerating of our self-importance, the idea that man is causing global warming is the ultimate arrogance.
We are so important, we in our time.
Our great desire to elevate ourselves and pat ourselves on the back.
It's hard for us to swallow that some people did way more than us, that we've never properly shown gratitude.
We try, we try to honor them, we try to honor those who serve, but they made a sacrifice that is so unbelievably strong, much of a generation just wiped out, families torn apart for this long effort that highlighted was highlighted by this bloody battle.
And it wasn't like that was the end.
Read about the Battle of the Bulge.
Again, I strongly recommend Band of Brothers, which followed that company which also fought in the Battle of Bulge, Charlie Company in World War II, so extraordinary that I think that at the very least, beyond honoring their memory, we need to learn from what happened and learn that in order for things to work out in our world, some awful sacrifices have to be made, and horrible evil has to be knocked down and beaten.
I'm Mark Belling on EIB.
For the next couple of hours of the program, we're going to have a normal, good old open line Friday with a lot of good material to get into.
I felt important that we spend the first hour of today's program talking about this compelling anniversary.
I've made the comment that our nation, I think, is not capable of doing a World War II again or tolerating something as audacious As D-Day.
What we do have, however, are people who are equally heroic.
There are Americans who right now join the military knowing full well there's a good chance they're going to be called to active duty and put in a war zone in a place like Afghanistan.
We have people who have died in both Gulf Wars and have died in Afghanistan and often do so without a country that has the kind of unanimity of support that World War II had in place.
We still do have heroes.
And D-Day allows those of us who haven't served the opportunity to think about those who are doing for our country more than we are.
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