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Sept. 11, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:37
September 11, 2014, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 247 Podcast.
Greetings to you once again, music lovers, thrill seekers, sports fans all across the fruited plain.
Great to have you back as we head into another busy broadcast day here on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Telephone number if you want to join us, as always, 800-282-2882, and the email address L Rushbow at EIB net.com.
Do you remember uh ladies and gentlemen when uh George W. Bush, some of you new to the program, you'll and if you've not heard this, it's amazing.
Or heard about this.
When George W. Bush, and Cookie, I don't want this.
Don't go get in it.
Tell about it.
George W. Bush, uh 2000 is looking for a vice presidential uh candidate to run with him.
And he appointed Cheney to head up the search committee.
And Cheney said, you know what?
I don't need to look.
I'm your guy.
And Bush said, you know what?
You're right.
You don't need to look.
You are my guy.
So Bush chose Cheney, and the media went out and we had an audio montage put together.
Had to be twenty five different media people, all explaining how Bush had chosen Cheney because he needed gravitas.
In other words, Bush was a lightweight.
Bush was an idiot.
Bush was a cowboy from Texas, a pretend faux Ivy Leaguer.
But Cheney, now there was some heft.
He was gravitas.
And it was amazing.
It like is like a memo went out from some central location to advise every analyst and commentator to refer to this as gravita.
It was uncanny.
So we are on the lookout at all times for repeats of that phenomenon.
And we have one.
We have I I got more people here than I can count.
Referring to President Obama after his speech last night, some before the speech.
Listen to this, and it will become abundantly clear to you.
The president has been described uh as a very reluctant warrior.
It was a remarkable moment for a reluctant warrior.
This reluctant wartime president.
A reluctant war president.
This is a president, although a very reluctant warrior.
A war-weary American, a reluctant president.
He's a reluctant warrior.
A reluctant warrior.
Then one who's seeking combat.
A very reluctant warrior.
Come across as a reluctant warrior.
Reluctant as is a reluctant warrior.
This reluctance that he's doing this reluctantly.
Reluctant leader is reluctant to go to war.
He's a very reluctant warrior.
He's deeply reluctant.
He's gotten turned tonight from being that reluctant warrior to being an actual warrior against ISIS.
It's just uncanny.
If I were in that business, I would want to say something unique.
I would want to say something different.
I would want to come up with a description that nobody else had.
Let me give you the names of people associated with what you just heard.
Antonio Mora, Jonathan Caro, Errol Barnett, Joe Kernan, F. Chuck Todd, Richard Haas, Ed Henry, George Mitchell, John Hilaman, Al Hunt, Harold Ford Jr., Judy Woodruff.
Hers was especially good.
Judy Woodruff said, this reluctance, that he's doing this reluctantly, as though her audience didn't know what reluctance meant.
Jonathan Alter had that role in the gravitas soundbite.
Gravitas, he said, to add weight to a thing.
As though the audience doesn't know what they're talking about.
Then there was Mark Maxie Shields, David Brooks, David Rodham Gurgen, John Harwood, and Van Jones.
Reluctant warrior.
He doesn't want to do this.
No way.
He's being dragged into this.
And it's all part the reluctant warrior bit, folks, is the is the subtle way to inform the low information crowd that this is a this is a leftover mess from George W. Bush.
And an Obama really, you know, he got us out of there.
Obama finally got us down there.
He doesn't want to go back in there.
Obama doesn't want to re-kill, but damn it!
Because Bush screwed it up.
That's unstated.
He got to go back in.
And it's uh just he's reluctant to, but he's a responsible guy, and he's a great leader, and he's gonna do what has to be done, even though he's reluctant.
Even though he's a warrior, he really doesn't want to do this, but he's been dragged back.
Now, I have a plethora of observations about last night's speech.
Catherine and I watched the speech together.
And I took copious notes, well, I left verbal audio notes to myself, and uh was pausing the playback.
I mean, he watched it live, but I would hit pause on my DBR and we'd look at each other and make comments.
And let me tell you the first observation I had, and I was I was it was borne out, I mean, within 30 seconds of the speech ending.
I paused this and I looked at Catherine and I said, There are a lot of people are going to think this is a great speech.
And theatrically it was.
We have to be honest about something here, folks.
Presentation will forget the content for a second.
Watch this as low information people.
The low information people are not going to pick up on the nuance.
They're not going to pick up on the contradiction until they're told about it.
And there were, I mean, that the the content of the speech was embarrassing.
But forget that the way it looked.
Obama's countenance as he was giving it.
For the first time, I'm just going to tell you, for the first time he gave a speech and made me think he actually wants America to win something.
For the first time he gave a speech, it actually made me think that he holds this country out to be something special.
Now, if I picked up on that, and I'm just using my powers of observation, and I'm not listening to the content per se.
I mean, I know that I know the conflicts, but he also said enough things that sounded like any other president that we've always trusted in situations like that.
It was a first.
And you will hear in the audio soundbite roster today.
Sandy Bergler said the same thing.
Sandy Berg was a first time we've actually had a presidential speech out of this guy.
I'm I'm paraphrasing his words, but Sandy Burglar had this observation.
And I said, theatrically and performance-wise, this is so markedly different that you're gonna have a lot of people really think this is a great speech.
And not 30 seconds after it ended, I get a flash from somebody telling me that Newt Gingrich is on CNN just praising this speech to the hilt, the best thing he's ever heard, best speech Obama's ever given, and I knew it, folks.
I knew that would be the reaction.
Now, Newt saying so, obvious reasons uh why.
It was not, however, when you get to the content, it was embarrassing.
When you get it was it was incompetence on parade.
It was dangerously unaware on parade, but theatrically, the way low information people, if they were even bothering to watch, I don't know.
And it's clear why they did.
The speech was purely political.
Two weeks ago, Obama didn't care about this.
Two weeks ago he had no strategy, two weeks ago it didn't matter.
But there are polls out there, left and right, that are disastrous for Obama.
This whole thing last night was political, but to a casual observer, and more importantly, to an American citizen who thinks that every president is out to defend and protect this country and is engaged in seeing to it that this country triumphs.
That speech last night sounded Eisenhower, Reagan, not content now, folks.
I want to be very snurly's looking at me.
I'm telling you, don't doubt me.
Now, having said all this, I'm not by any stretch the only person who is ripping the speech to shreds content-wise.
Almost everybody is.
Well, I'm just talking about the theatrics.
I mean, if you're a casual viewer to this thing, it was so markedly different for what...
He didn't even get close to making you think he was going to apologize for America, for example.
He didn't get close to making you think that he thinks we're responsible for this.
He didn't get anywhere close to blaming America last night, but he got practically every important point dead wrong.
For example, you know.
ISIS is not Islamic.
ISIS is not Muslim.
Oh, really?
Is there is it a religion in the world that targets innocence for death.
Oh, yes, there is dead wrong magnanimously proudly, loudly wrong.
The strategy that he unveiled is a joke.
Can I basically tell me the strategy is?
We're gonna fly some drones and some jets supporting the Iraqi army.
Now that's a that that that's it.
Uh we're gonna train.
We are going to train the Iraqi army.
See, we're gonna train the Iraqi army.
Now, two weeks ago, the army didn't need to be trained.
We got the i i the point is if if we had not extricated ourselves from Iraq the way Obama did, you know, he had perfectly good status of forces agreement.
The main thing you want in a status of forces agreement when you're pulling out of a country like we were out of Iraq.
You're gonna leave a residual force to protect what you have won.
We've done it everywhere.
Germany, Japan, you name it.
But we didn't in Iraq.
And Obama says because he couldn't get a status of forces agreement, and what he claimed he couldn't get was immunity for U.S. soldiers who would engage in post-war combat events.
And he says, if you're if if you Iraqis are not going to immunize American soldiers, we're not hanging around here.
We're not gonna have our guys appearing before war crimes tribunals and stuff.
But the point that he did have a status.
He got out because of his kook fringe bay.
He got out because of his campaign of 2000.
He got out because that was what he built his campaign on.
The entire Democrat Party on the left tried to say that Iraq was ill-timed, unjust, unnecessary, should never have been there.
And I find it just ironic as it can be that here we are now about to start the final two years of this guy's presidency, and it rests on what he does in Iraq.
I think this is some of the juiciest irony I could have come up with.
That his presidency, and this, by the way, this is not me.
It's in some some hair-brained leftist media analyst that I have here in the audio soundbite roster, is saying now that Obama's presidency is going to be judged entirely by what happens here in Iraq.
Isn't that juicy?
The the party, the Democrat Party, and this still ticks me off.
The Democrat Party, which sought defeat the whole time we were in Iraq, just so they could win an election, just so they could saddle the defeat with uh on George W. Bush.
They did everything they could to undermine the troops.
They did everything they could to undermine leadership.
They did everything they could to undermine morale.
They and their willing accomplices in the media, they did everything they could to secure defeat.
But they couldn't pull that off before Obama was elected.
So Iraq was still going on after he wins.
And what is his campaign and what's his whole identity as a Democrat senator?
Iraq stinks, never should have gone.
I'm gonna get us out.
It was an absolute terrible mistake, got nothing for it, man, and so he had to get everybody out.
And leaving everybody out, Obama gave us ISIS.
Obama gave us ISIL.
Obama and the Democrat Party, and it's kind of sweet irony now that he's got to go, as the reluctant warrior, that he has to go back in now and try to defeat an uprising Islamic jihadist.
ISIS or ISIL, the same thing, just depends on what acronym you want to use.
Michael Moore has abandoned him.
A bunch of far left wing previous Obama supporters are fit to be tied.
We're going back in there.
Their hatred of the Iraq war was irrational to begin with.
Their devotion to our defeat in Iraq was irrational to begin with, but it was defining for them.
And here it is, their guy, their savior, their guy.
He's the one the smartest.
He was able to pull us out.
It's like a mafia guy tries to leave and they just keep sucking me back in.
I try to get out.
I try to leave, but they just keep grabbing me back.
And that's Obama, the reluctant warrior.
The strategy does not look good.
The plan does not look good because it depends way too much on people that probably are not good enough to accomplish this particular mission.
So we get into details of all of that.
This is just the overview reaction.
In addition, the assault on an institution that creates more millionaires among African Americans than any other industry continues.
The assault on the National Football League continues now.
An independent investigation by a former head of the FBI to find out when Roger Goodell or anybody in the NFL office saw the video from inside the elevator.
Meanwhile, can anybody in this audience name for me the players of the week in week one?
You can't.
No, it wasn't Tony Romo.
That's real.
We'll be back here, folks.
Don't go.
America's real anchor man, the doctor of democracy, Rush Linboy at 800-282-2882.
One of the first observations that I um I had last night about the speech was that the president's announcing it detail by detail.
Strategy.
Here's what we're going to do.
Here's who's going to do it.
This is where we're going to do it.
And this is hopefully how we're going to do it.
So why in the world would you announce your strategy?
Why would you telegraph what you're going to do?
And then I reminded myself again the purpose of this speech.
The purpose of this speech was political.
This was not a speech designed to explain or it was not, it was not a speech designed to explain a strategy of victory.
It was it was for political consumption by voters in this country.
It was a speech designed to counter what people obviously think and feel as represented in polling data.
Fox News poll ten pieces of bad news for the White House.
This is why the speech was scheduled last night.
American voters feel Obama weak and indecisive.
The U.S. is less respected since Obama became president.
The U.S. should do more to stop ISIS.
Obama isn't willing to do what it takes to defeat ISIS.
ISIS will try to attack the U.S. soon.
People are embarrassed about Obama not having a strategy for dealing with ISIS.
Obama will try to manage ISIS rather than defeat.
all results from polls all over the place.
The polls also find that for the first time more voters than not feel the U.S. is less safe today than before.
But Folks, it's a disaster.
The polling data, not just from Fox News, the polling data all over the place about U.S. national security, about Obama's role as commander-in-chief, about Obama's role dealing with ISIS.
It's a disaster.
For the first time, more voters than not feel America is less safe today than before 9-11.
Obama's job approval is at record lows on Syria on Iraq and terrorism, and the overall job approval matches his all-time low.
And most people say they would tell Obama to kill extremists beheading Americans now rather than caution him against overreaching.
He's seen as indecisive.
He's seen as weak.
He is seen as not engaged.
He's seen as not caring very much.
That's why the speech happened last night.
And that is why every detail of the strategy was revealed, so that voters could see this is a tough commander-in-chief.
And this is a guy who understands the military.
And he knows how to deploy it, and he's willing to do it.
Gotta erase this polling data, see.
The views expressed by the host on this program, documented to be almost always right, 99.7% of the time.
Uh, views expressed by the host of this program may not represent necessarily the views of the staff management of this station.
But they should and ultimately will.
800-282-2882.
Back on Monday, I had an audio soundbite, and I didn't get to it because the circumstance didn't present itself.
The circumstance has now presented itself.
I mentioned earlier in the program the status of forces agreement, and I made the claim that we really are in this circumstance today.
ISIS.
And by the way, ISIS ISIL is the same thing.
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or the Islamic State of Iraq and I forget what the L stands for at the top of my head, but it's the same thing.
It's not two different groups.
It's no different than some people pronounce it Osama bin Laden and some say Osama bin Laden.
It's the same thing.
There's a third way this group is referred to, just IS, the Islamic State.
And that's what Obama said they're not Islamic, and they are.
They're the old Al Qaeda in Iraq.
The point is they wouldn't exist, clearly not as uh powerful as they as they are, had we not cut and run from Iraq.
Now I don't want to be repetitive and went through this in the first half hour, but we all know why.
You know, Obama, the Democrats never believed in Iraq.
They never thought it was necessary.
And it was more important that we lose there for their political fortune.
It was more important that Iraq become totally unnecessary.
It was more important that Iraq be a total waste time, a waste of every military life and injury.
Iraq, in their worldview, was supposed to be one of the biggest mistakes countries ever made by George W. Bush, an incompetent cowboy just trying to avenge his father's attempted assassination by Saddam, or Dick Cheney trying to enrich Halliburton or whatever the kind of cockamamy crap they came up with.
But the bottom line is Iraq for them was a political opportunity.
They had to trash it, they had to render it phony, unbelievable, unreal, unimportant.
It had no it had no relationship to the United States whatsoever in the war on terror.
That's how they looked at it.
They talked about it for five years.
They did everything they could to discredit Bush and anybody else that supported, including General Petraeus.
You remember all that.
So Obama campaigns for president gets elected on the premise that he's gonna finally get us out of here.
He's gonna end torture, he's gonna close Gitmo, he's going to close this whole horrid chapter of history that shows what an absolute reprobate this country is.
What an absolute disaster America is.
He's gonna end it, and he's gonna put it back together, and the planet's gonna heal.
And the world is gonna love America again, and there isn't gonna be any more Al-Qaeda, and there isn't gonna be any more terrorism because Obama's here, and he has a special way to relate to these people because his name's Barack and he grew up somewhere else.
He's a powerful guy, he's the smartest guy, he's a messiah, he can do it all.
He can heal the planet, he can lower the sea levels, he can lower the temperature, he can save all the endangered species.
He can get rid of oil, and he can go with alternative energy.
We can have no pollution ever, and nobody's ever gonna die, and we're gonna have universal health care to make sure nobody ever dies.
There was gonna be a utopia, and it was all centered around the fact that we're gonna get the hell out of Iraq.
Right.
And that's what they did.
First chance, skedaddled, left no residual force because they never took it seriously as a military engagement.
They never took it seriously as a military operation.
They couldn't afford to all of a sudden take it seriously after Obama wins the White House.
They'd spent five years trashing it.
They and their friends in the media had spent five years telling the American people that Iraq was a total boondoggle, a mistake.
We should never have been there.
We should never have gone in the first place, and we're not going to leave any evidence that we've ever been there.
It's an embarrassment.
And so that's what he did.
He gets elected, and we get out of there.
The thing is, in a couple of key ways, Iraq was a win.
There were democratic elections taking place there.
People actually voting for the first time.
It was a win.
But because in the Democrat Party view, the Obama view it was never legitimate.
And because of all the campaign promises, because the five-year campaign to discredit it and destroy anybody involved with it, they pulled out and they left no residual force.
We still have bases in Germany, for example.
We have a presence in the in the Far East in Japan.
We always maintain status of forces in places where we have secured victory to keep the peace.
Serious thing.
We didn't in Iraq.
Obama pulled him out and he claimed he couldn't get a deal with Nori El Maliki.
But we had a deal.
He just didn't want to leave anybody.
He couldn't afford to.
He had to placate this rabid, insane lunatic fringe base of his, which consists of many very wealthy donors.
So because of that, Iraq has been vulnerable, and that is why any insurgent group that wanted to has had pretty much a free reign in rising to power.
The Iraqis were never trained.
This is another crock.
This whole business that we're going to train the Iraqis two weeks ago they didn't know how to do anything.
Now we're going to train them.
You know what we may as well do, folks?
We may as well say that our strategy, we're going to hit them with a one-two punch.
Last night we hit him with a tough speech.
And today we're going to hit him with a Twitter hashtag air raid.
Because that's the equivalent of what Obama is doing.
Now I want to take you back.
This is the audio sound by the head on Monday.
And Megan Kelly aired this on Fox last night after the speech.
It's from 2007.
And I had it in my roster on Monday, and I kicked myself here for not getting to it.
There's a lot of stuff yesterday I didn't get to either, but I I've got a holdover stack here.
This was July 12th, in 2007.
It's at the White House.
And Bush is holding a news conference.
Now remember, we're looking here at hindsight.
I want you to remember the way this is 2007.
George Bush is the biggest idiot on earth.
This is the guy that the Democrats and the media for four years had told us the world hates.
This is the guy we couldn't trust.
Just a warmonger cowboy.
He and Dick Cheney just trying to blood for oil, all this stuff.
Stupid, talks dumb.
The world hates us.
The world hates Bush.
I want you to listen to what Bush warned of in this press conference of 2007.
I know some in Washington would like us to start leaving Iraq now.
To begin with drawing before our commanders tell us we're ready, would be dangerous for Iraq, for the region, and for the United States.
It would mean surrendering the future of Iraq to Al-Qaeda.
It would mean that we'd be risking mass killings on a horrific scale.
It would mean we'd allow the terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they lost in Afghanistan.
It would mean increasing the probability that American troops would have to return at some later date to confront an enemy that is even more dangerous.
Bingo.
Bingo.
George W. Bush seven years ago calling it.
Remember now, he's the idiot.
He's the dunce.
He's the cowboy.
Obama.
Yeah, now we're talking.
Now we're talking real Ivy League brilliance.
Yeah, Obama.
Now we're talking real genius.
Got that great crease in his slacks.
David Brooks noticed, oh yeah.
Man, this guy, he's better than any of us.
This guy's so smart.
We can't even keep up with him.
He's so smart, we can't even see him.
He's so far out in front of him.
Bush, what a dunce.
What a glittering jewel of colossal.
Just listen to the way old Bush talks.
Sounds like a dumb text.
It's just stupid.
You know, just stupid.
Embarrassingly stupid.
Embarrassing everybody in America, how stupid our president is.
George seven years ago calling exactly what has happened.
We have to return to confront an enemy even more dangerous.
And make no mistake, Obama is doing everything he can to try to make sure the blame for his having to go back to Iraq never leaves Bush.
But we're not going to permit that on this program.
Matthew Cooper in Newsweek.
I didn't know Newsweek still existed.
I know that the print version doesn't exist.
I didn't know Newsweek.
I thought it got all folded.
Well, it didn't.
And there's a guy writing there named Matthew Cooper.
There have been a lot of Matthew Cooper's in uh in Washington over the years.
I don't know which one this is.
But this is a far-left publication.
Newsweek is brutal here on Obama.
The four most depressing moments in Obama's speech from Newsweek.
Obama said Somalia and Yemen are successes last night, folks.
How many of you even know what's happened in Somalia and Yemen?
The way he thinks he can get away with it, he didn't think low information, but well, what?
We had a terrorist anti-terrorist plan in Yemen and Somalia.
Most people don't even know.
So Obama, yeah, great examples of success stories, but Matthew Cooper says, good lord.
At least when Bill Clinton famously pointed to Bangladesh as an economic model for microbusinesses, he had a point.
I mean, it's not that anybody expects Somalia and Yemen to be Swiss-like after hearing from our drones and special forces, but Somalia is utter chaos.
And Yemen is terrorist rich.
We haven't destroyed anybody there.
And yet Obama's claiming success.
A broad-based coalition, Obama said.
Guess who's not in it?
Germany's not in it.
The UK's not in it.
A broad-based coalition, he said was nine nation.
Well, he didn't even specify.
It's it's gonna be about seven countries.
Matthew Cooper says, broad-based coalition, let's see.
There's a lot of reason to doubt that the countries we need the most will do much.
Turkey is the transit point for would-be terrorists who want to join the ISIS.
Maybe uh John Kerry, who served a Vietnam will work a miracle, but this coalition feels more like George W. Bush's than his father's.
Folks, you gotta understand.
When Obama is compared to Bush, I mean, that imagine whoever you hate most and being compared to him.
That's oh whoa, oh, what is that is a deep wound you can't believe.
For Obama's Iraq policy to be compared to Bush's by these people.
This the third thing that was scary, the myth of moderates we can support.
And Obama did.
He kept about moderates here and moderates there, Syria, moderates in Iraq, that we can team with.
And there aren't any.
And then he talked with the Iraqi army.
We just spent countless dollars to train the Iraqi army for the past ten years, and what did it get us?
It got us an army that collapsed when ISIS rolled across Iraq.
And so now Obama is going to train the Iraq army in two weeks.
Get him up and running.
The Iraq army represents the ground phase of the operation.
The Iraq army.
And for those of you students in military conflict, you know the ground phase is where you win or lose.
You can have all the drones and jets you want, but the ground phase.
This is Newsweek ripping Obama and his speech to shreds.
Look at this, folks, from the Hill.com.
A new poll.
A new Gallup poll.
The public thinks Republicans will do a better job keeping the U.S. safe by a wider margin than at any time since 2002.
That would be 11 years ago, folks.
Twelve years ago.
The public thinks Republicans are doing a better job keeping America safe by a wider margin than at any time in the last 14 years.
It's a 23-point lead.
In that category.
Wait a minute.
Yeah, 23 points.
5530 doesn't add up, but it's it's massive.
And this is another reason why they were desperate to get Obama on TV last night.
And it's another Obama contradicted last is I I do not I'm not pulling back, folks.
Casual observer looking at that speech last night would think it was presidential.
A casual low information voter, because it was what any president would do.
He said and looked and acted and had an attitude that was commensurate with any president during such an occasion.
For Obama, it was a first.
But even so, that would mean it would be welcomed.
But the truth is he contradicted everything he said for five years.
He contradicted everything he said two weeks ago.
Everything.
Last night was a contradiction of everything Obama has ever said about any of this.
So we all know that somebody put those words on the teleprompter.
And he rehearsed them and he performed them.
I mean, he even leaned on American exceptionalism to find the right way last night.
You don't know Snarl because you didn't see.
But it was a it was a total contradiction.
And you look at this poll data that's out there, I don't care where you look, it's every poll.
That's why they had to get him on TV.
That's why they have to stop the bleeding.
That's why every detail of the strategy was revealed.
To show that Obama's up to speed, to show that Obama's a great general, to show that Obama can lead the country into war, to show that Obama's willing to pull the trigger, to show that Obama's willing to go after the bad guys, except.
Except he he there was one moment of honesty.
I think he couldn't, he couldn't bring himself to tell the truth about ISIS.
He had to lie and say they're not Islam, and then he furthers there is not a single religion in the world that advocates practices the killing of innocents.
I mean, it it that that you talk about a howler.
That's the kind of thing that gets the informed jumping up off their couches and really, really worried.
Yes, yes, yes, of course we're gonna be getting to the NFL.
That's to target rich too.
This is it it it continues, you know.
I keep wanting to say I'm amazed.
I'm not.
The fact of the matter is, sadly, I have foreseen this coming.
I was one of the early ringers of the warning bell.
I'm can I think the NFL owners are still clueless about what really is going on here.
But I'm telling you, I that the the the this now gang, the President Naggs is all over TV demanding that that Goodell be impeached and fired and thrown away and put in prison.
I mean they're not gonna let this go.
And the media, even Bob Costas, well he's gonna keep an open mind until he learns otherwise.
If he learns otherwise, Goodell's gonna have to go.
So I'm telling you, folks, you're just gonna Fastest three hours in media.
I can't believe the first hour's over.
Can't but it is, because it is what it is, and the clock doesn't lie.
We have atomic clocks here.
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