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Dec. 10, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:29
December 10, 2014, Wednesday, Hour #2
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Meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
I am Rush Lynn Ball, America's real anchor man, America's truth detector and a doctor of democracy, right here behind a golden EIB microphone.
Great to be here, folks.
Telephone numbers 80082-2882 in the email address, Lrushbow at EIBNet.com.
So Diane Feinstein, who I think poses a great risk.
Finally let the cat out of the bag.
Diane Feinstein of whatever it is that is motivating her or did motivate her to just unleash the dogs here, is now out there saying that none of these interrogations produced any worthwhile intelligence.
That is just absurd.
It's irresponsible and it's wrong.
And it is doing a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line trying to capture these people and interview them, interrogate them and try to figure out what it is they know.
So have we been hit since 9-11?
We've not been.
Has there been a major terrorist plot that succeeded in this country since 9-11?
No, there has not.
And yet Diane Feinstein's out there running around saying that none of this worked.
In fact, she's out saying it was counterproductive.
But none of this intel had any value whatsoever.
None of the interrogations produced any intel of any value whatsoever.
That's just irresponsible.
Now, whatever happened here, she has taken it personally and has decided to use her committee chairmanship to use this intelligence committee.
There were no Republicans involved in this report.
There were no Republicans involved in any of the machinery that resulted in this report.
There was nothing bipartisans, that seems to be the magic word today, because Boehner's out there by the way now, talking about how, well, we only did what the American people wanted us to do.
We worked together and came up with a budget.
That's not what you were elected to do.
And Diane Feinstein was not elected to single-handedly undermine the intelligence gathering apparatus of this country, but she's taken something very personal here.
I guess some Democrats were being investigated.
Why wouldn't they?
They leak all over the place.
Pat Leahy's middle name is Leaky.
These people have leaked.
Ted Kennedy back in the days when Reagan was president, actually called the Soviet Union and warned them about him.
Anyway, last night on the Fox News channel, our old buddy Jose Rodriguez, who ran the interrogation program of the CIA.
We've played sound bites of him from 60 minutes before.
He was on the The Hannity TV show last night.
And the first question he was asked, well, the first of the three that we have.
Did I just hear Diane Feinstein acknowledge this report may cause more violence?
That we can't prevent?
Did she just admit that?
And she did, by the way.
And she added to it by now claiming that they learned nothing of any value in any of these interrogations at Guantanamo Bay.
Absolutely nothing.
Now, part and parcel of that, by the way.
Is that Obama is still looking to come up with ways to shut the place down?
What better way to do it than to have a leading senator, the intelligence committee, the chairwoman, in fact, come out and say that whatever went on down there produced nothing.
So Hannity says, Tell me if if if they didn't release the port report, then wait a minute.
This doesn't make any sense.
Here's here's what the question was.
Did I just hear Diane Feinstein acknowledge this report may cause more violence?
That we can't prevent that.
He says that would tell me that if they didn't release the report, it could prevent more violence, could it?
Anyway, here's what Resriet Rodriguez said.
I think it's a very dark day for the CIA.
I think the CIA has been thrown under the bus.
And you know, the CIA is the country's paramount intelligence service, and it has a very important mission.
And the mission is to protect American interests, to protect the homeland, to safeguard American lives.
And it needs to be held accountable when it screws up.
And you know, there's a lot of moving parts and a lot of risk taken when we do very complex terrorism covert action.
In this case, I believe that, you know, we've been thrown under the bus.
And the politicians are playing uh political football with the CIA.
The Democrat politicians are playing political football with the CIA.
I was at a Steelers game one day.
Obviously it would have been a Sunday, because I don't go to the Monday night, Thursday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night games.
And I ran into the CI director at the time, General Hayden.
He's from Pittsburgh.
He's a Steelers fan.
And I I asked him a question.
I also asked Rumsfeld this question when he's secretary of defense.
I said, I said, Mr. Hayden, is there any one person?
You're the director, is any one person.
He might have retired by the time I met him, I'm not sure.
He might have been the former CIA director of the time.
I'm not sure.
Doesn't matter.
He was either there or recently departed.
I said, is there any one person at the CIA who knows everything going on under the auspices of the sea?
And he laughed at me.
No way.
And I said, is that right?
Is there one person who, if he wants to find out everything going on, can?
He laughed and said, no.
And you know one of the reasons why?
Above and beyond the obvious, one of the reasons why, not a single person knows everything going on.
There are some units that are operating without orders.
They have leeway and they are deployed and they go do they've got they've got a mission, they've got an assignment.
But how they do it, where they go to do it, totally up to them.
Many of them are off the grid, working amongst themselves, and they may be in places that you know a few support people might know in the agency might know for obvious reasons, but it's part of the strategy behind the the use of elite special forces and elite units, is that they're so good, and they are so accomplished, they are so achieved that they give themselves their orders.
They they they follow the globe, they've got a general umbrella under which they're operating, but they go wherever it takes them.
And I had never even stopped to think of that.
I I think of the military, the intelligence apparatus as a strict top-down hierarchy, that nobody does a thing unless they're ordered to do it, and that parameters are very narrowly defined.
And it's just the way I've always assumed it.
I mean, nobody told me that.
It's just the way I've grown up assuming things by observing how people in that business uh work.
And I asked Rumsfeld, I said, is there anyone, you're the Secretary of Defense, is there anybody at the Pentagon who knows everything going on in that building?
He said, that's not possible.
I said, Well, how do you how do we police it, control it?
He said, it's just too massive.
And then they're there, yeah, everything's under orders and so forth, but there are projects that are eyes only, ears only, that are classified to one degree or another.
I said, but there's not one person that you can go to who knows everything.
What if I'm the president?
Something happens in the world and I want to know what's going on.
There's not a single person I call the Pentagon or state that knows.
Well, there is a person that knows what you want to know, Mr. President, but that person may not know everything going on.
That's how massive and big it is.
So here's Jose Rodriguez, who led the interrogation efforts against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
We know that everything we got from him was valuable.
We found additional people have been involved in 9-11.
If it weren't for these techniques, we wouldn't have known where Osama bin Laden was, and we wouldn't have been able to kill him so that Obama could take cowboy credit for it.
For Diane Feinstein to be running around today saying two things.
A, none of the intel was worth it.
There was no value in it.
And yeah, yeah, this report being released may cause more violence that we can't prevent, but this is the price that we must pay for these egregious errors that we have made by engaging in values beneath us as Americans.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And it's the same old poisonous liberal thinking.
We're the problem.
We've behaved badly.
We've overstepped our bounds.
We're reprobates here or there, and We have to pay the price.
We have to find out what it's like for the people that we have harmed and damaged and impugned.
And I don't psychologically this they're overrun with guilt.
I don't know what the hell it is.
I can't possibly relate to being one of these people.
I can't imagine what life being a liberal is like every day.
You gotta be mad about something all the time.
You can never be happy, never be satisfied.
You gotta be walking around with constant levels of guilt that need the levels of guilt are so deep you need medication for it.
I can't relate to these people.
I know them like the back of my hand, but I can't imagine being one of them.
The anger, the guilt, the belief that your own country's the bad guys.
The belief that your own country is the problem in the world.
And it's about time we paid the price for it.
That just boggles the mind.
The Hannity then said to Jose Rodriguez, you know these senators, these lawmakers.
Do you uh you remember any specific meetings with them?
Was Diane Feinstein told specifically what the CIA was doing in terms of enhanced interrogation?
There are about 40 instances where we briefed the Senate and the House intelligence committees over the life of the uh program from 2002 to 2009, briefed Diane Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi and Rockefeller and many others all the time.
I remember very clearly them telling me, you know, the problem that you guys have is that you are risk-averse.
You need to use the authorities that we have given you to go out there and destroy this organization and to kill bin Laden.
So we feel that we briefed them and we briefed them thoroughly, and they are you know hypocritical.
Obviously, there's if they've been briefed all these times and they're out there saying nobody told them anything today.
Diane Feinstein's out there saying that this uh this this information held back.
See, I didn't tell her what all was going on.
And you know, this is like the same scenario that happened with the first vote authorizing the use of force in Iraq in 2003.
These Democrats voted against it until they saw public opinion.
So public opinion was profoundly in favor, overwhelmingly in favor.
They asked for a second vote.
So Mrs. Clinton and all these guys, Rockefeller, Reed, all these, the only person that didn't really was, well, Obama wasn't there yet, but he publicly said he would never have voted for the use of force, i.e.
authorizing the war in Iraq.
Most of these Democrats did.
But how how long did it take them?
It was less than a year, a year and a half, and they're all out running around acting like they never voted for it, and they were lied to about it, and the Bush administration had never told them what the plans were, and had that happened, they would have never supported it after they had all voted for it.
And of course, the media's backing them up a hundred percent.
And now here, Jose Rodriguez says, Yeah, we told them what we're doing 40 different times, 40 different times I went up there, I testified.
Rockefeller, uh Pelosi, Diane Feinstein.
They knew what we were doing, but now conveniently they run around and act like nobody told them, and that they've been sandbagged and they only recently learned how outrageous our actions were, and so now they're trying to act all offended.
He said a bunch of hypocrites.
And then the last question from Hannity, you're saying the accusation that these enhanced interrogation techniques were used beyond what we had already been disclosed.
You're saying is false, number one, and that in spite of their suggestion that they were not successful, you're saying, in fact, that's not true.
Well, you were there, Mr. Rodriguez.
Were these techniques successful?
It was a very successful, and for those of us who were there, it is just amazing that they could have come to this conclusion.
Those of us who read the intelligence coming out of our black sites every morning and who acted on that intelligence know the value, and basically it led to the destruction of the organization.
You know, this administration actually does not take any prisoners.
They prefer to kill them from afar using drones, and somehow they feel that because they kill from a distance, somehow it's more ethical.
Uh More ethical than the difficult and messy and unpleasant task and mission of actually uh interrogating uh prisoners.
I think it's a distortion of what our values are.
A men, a frigging men.
That is exactly frigging right.
These people are running around talking about this is not who we are.
This is not our values.
And what he's pointing, oh, yeah, our values are to kill from 10,000 feet with a drone that none of these people, including Americans that have been killed with drones.
He's pointing out this administration been more deadly than anything we happen to do at Guantanamo Bay.
And he's exactly right about it.
I can't think another time out.
Back with your phone calls after this, folks.
Don't go away.
By the way, let me reiterate something.
The Democrat staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee did not talk to a single person from the CIA.
You know who they talked to?
They talked to the lawyers for the terrorists in Club Gitmo.
Now the lawyers for the terrorists, Club Gitmore, people like Eric Holder, and people from the firm Eric Holder worked at before he became attorney general, and a bunch of typical left wing lawyers who are also of the belief the United States is the problem.
Eagerly signing up for clients like those at Club Gitmo, eagerly wanting to represent them because of the soapbox opportunity it provides to rip into America.
And so here you have these wonderful little Senate Democrat staffers.
And I will tell you something.
I would venture to say that these staffers are probably much more informed than Dianne Feinstein is.
You know, in the discussion of term limits that we've had since the early 90s, one of the legitimate reasons people object to term limits is, hey, you can get rid of the elected official all you want.
If the staff doesn't change, nothing's going to change.
The staff, be they staff or members of the House or Senate or whatever, they are these nameless, faceless people behind the scenes doing all the position paper writing, all the policy position writing, all of this.
And a number of these senators, particularly elderly ones, are just pointing to the door.
You go out there and you sit in the chair with your name on it and try not to fall asleep, and we'll handle the rest of it.
And if you don't term limit the staff, well, then you're really not having that great an impact.
To the phones, we go to Waverly, Ohio.
It's Billy.
I'm glad you called, sir.
Great to have you in the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Rush, it's absolutely an honor to speak with you.
Thank you.
Thank you enough for everything that you do.
Uh the books that you've written, Rush Revere, we use in our homeschool.
But uh reason I called today, one is my birthday, it just so happens I got through, but mainly I've listened to you for years, I've listened to you be right on about our country or government, but today you really hit a chord.
When you talked about torture 2007, February 14th, all of a sudden was killed in Iraq.
And every since then, I listened to what the government says, um, how they've run down the troops, how they've run down their efforts.
Oh, I can only imagine the mixture of emotions you go through.
Your son killed in 2007, you get to listen to a Democrat essentially agree with the premise that our soldiers are rapists and terrorizing women and children at Iraq.
I would be and and now you get to hear how what how their work was irrelevant and unnecessary because it was all illegitimate.
I would be, I'd be out of my mind if I were you.
Yes, sir.
It does.
It scares you inside.
It just, you know, that they don't understand sacrifice, they don't understand service.
Um they don't mind living under the liberty.
They don't mind using that.
Sir, it's it's not that, it's that they're just selfish.
The world revolves around them.
They're narcissists, and they are entirely self-devoted and self-focused.
And they're concerned Only with people's perception of them, either in the upcoming poll or in an upcoming election or or what have you.
And I guarantee you that Diane Feinstein or Dick Durbin, none of the others, they don't even stop to think what their words might mean to people like you, the parents and family members of people who are volunteering to defend this country.
They don't even stop to think about it.
Not that it would stop them if they did, don't misunderstand, but I don't even think they get to the point of stopping to think about it.
We these these are the people that impune military people by claiming they only sign up because there's no decent economic opportunity in this country for them, that if they had their brains about them, they wouldn't sign up.
That's John Kerry.
I t I I would be I uh at my wit's end if I were in your shoes.
Well, I'll tell you honestly, Russ, it's it's you and others like you that understand that put it out there for others to hear and and to understand.
So that that makes the difference.
That that makes a difference and worthwhile.
Does it really appreciate what you're doing?
Well, I I'm I'm I'm uh flattered to hear that.
I I uh I appreciate that.
I uh but I that's seems like so little compared you you recall who you've lost your son, and you have to listen to all this go on and on about how the effort he was involved in it was illegitimate and the victory that we had or the loss that we doesn't mean anything.
I don't I feel for you, sir.
I really I makes me mad as I stop and think about it.
And we're back, El Rushbow here behind the golden EIB microphone, executing a signed host duties flawlessly.
Zero mistakes.
Here's John in Winterhaven, Florida, as we head back to the phones.
Hello, sir.
Rush, what an honor.
I go back with you from the day I found you on the net the dial thirty years ago or so.
But I feel like I've gotten a PhD in not only conservative politics or what I call founding father values, but you have.
I mean, we don't we don't award any greed degrees here, but you have the equivalent of one.
If you've been here that long, there is no question you have a tremendous high education here as a result of steady listening to this program.
You do.
And and I appreciate what you've done all these years and are continuing to do.
It's a huge sacrifice from a time perspective, but you're um you do it with one hand, you know, tied behind your back or your your right.
Half my brain tied behind my but it's not a there's I don't sacrifice anything, believe me.
There's no such you do it so well, but I'll certainly certainly advise me to get to my point, I will.
And I'm I and I often hear you opine about the fact, and I totally agree that our GOP establishment just sit mute as issue after issue after issue is handed them on a silver platter, and you never hear them take up the uh take it up and and run with it and articulate a point.
And I just have a theory, much like the uh Limbaugh theory, this is a sort of baby tiny, not even to be compared to the Limbaugh theory, but I do you suppose that they sit back knowing full well that you're going to articulate the point they should be making to to your audience, and uh I mean, we see the midterm elections go our way, and it obviously is not because they are making the point as uh as elected people.
Uh I I'm just I just long uh you know, I'm I'm an observer of political.
I think that used to be the case.
I think it used to be that Republicans slash conservative leaders would rely on me and others in the so-called conservative media to take the arrows for them.
We would be the ones to explain, we would be the ones to inspire, we would be the ones to fire up, we would be the ones to uh basically take the hit when there was reaction to it.
In other words, they relied on us to inform their voters who they were.
They relied on us to tell their voters what they were gonna do.
But I don't think any more that's the case, because they don't do what their voters believe they're gonna do.
And clearly, I'd no longer espouse what they believe.
So I don't I don't think that is a factor.
It was, I think, not long ago.
But I don't know, whatever the last three years, last four years, it's become there's a transformation that's taken place among the Republican leadership.
It's not it's it's kind of complicated here, really, because the Republican Party has never really been enamored of conservatives.
The Republican Party has been tolerant.
But for the most part, the Republican Party has to the Republican Party did not like Reagan.
I mean, the establishment wing of it did not like Reagan.
They don't like conservatives.
And one of the reasons why, and there are many, there are many reasons I'm sure I haven't even thought of.
But one of the basic reasons is that the mainstream Republican Party does not oppose a big government.
They want to run it.
The mainstream of the Republican Party, I think my brother wrote a column about this phenomenon just this week.
It's a lot of conservatives make the mistake of thinking it's just the Republican leadership.
But there are a lot of Republicans, voting Republicans who are perfectly fine with Obamacare.
There are a lot of Republicans, mainstream Republicans.
Hey, you know, look, let's let's uh let's not do too much here on immigration.
There's a lot of mainstream Republican voters who embody the same fear that Republican leaders do.
Oh, we can't make the Hispanics mad at us.
I'll give an example.
There are a lot of mainstream Republican voters who are embarrassed by Sarah Palin.
Now Snerdley's looking at me with a frown and a look of disbelief on his face.
But I think there's something that we have to face.
It's not just the Republican establishment that is unwilling to fight Obama.
There are plenty of mainstream Republicans who are unwilling to as well.
My point here is that not every Republican voter is a conservative.
That's my point.
There are a lot of moderate Republicans out there.
You know it as well as I do.
You can sit there and frown all you want, but you know it as well as I do.
Lost influence.
Those voters had lost influence.
I don't know that they've lost influence.
Who do we keep nominating in uh in our presidential primaries?
But here, back to the original point.
The fact is that there are a lot of Republican, not just the Republican establishment, but there are a lot of mainstream Republicans to whom the idea of reducing the size of government isn't a big deal.
You don't see the benefit, they're not oriented the way we conservatives are about this.
It's okay if we do, but they're not gonna go to war over it.
Now the Republican establishment, I mean the elected Republican establishment actually, and some of the so-called conservative media establishment is actually okay with a big government.
And you can identify those people very easily if you read what they write, they will say things like we believe in a strong executive and a big government managed smartly.
We believe in smart management, smart government, and we'll reduce parts of government that are wasteful and extraneous and unnecessary, but as a as an overall operating principle, the idea that government must be reduced, that's that's not a Republican Party view.
They want to run the big government.
They want to be Senate Committee Chairman.
Do you realize look at it this way, just the way they do.
If you are a Republican senator, you control, you have access to, and it is in a way of thinking, one one hundredth of the United States budget.
You don't have to be on the Finance Committee.
You don't have to be in the banking committee.
You vote on all the legislation.
There's a hundred people in this club.
So that means the full force size and power and wealth of the U.S. government is held in the hands of 100 people.
And most of them have no desire for that big pie to get smaller.
They want to run.
They want to be in charge of who gets that money because that's where the power resides.
They want to be in charge of being able to write legislation that offers tax break here, tax break over there, tax increase here, you name it, but that's where the power.
That's why I've always believed that real tax reform isn't going to happen with uh people that are going to be running for re-election.
Because the purpose of the tax code is not to raise money.
It's social architecture.
The purpose of tax code is how members of Congress wield power.
And they're not going to willingly vote it away.
Now, if you have a Civics 101 belief, if you believe that most Republicans believe in small government and believe in a less intrusive government and believe in individual liberty and freedom, then you would think they would all be hell bit of reducing the size of government, expanding the public and private sector, expanding the free market and free enterprise economy, expanding entrepreneurism and opportunity, but you would be wrong.
That is not a guiding principle of the Republican Party.
And it's out there to be seen.
Some people don't want to admit that because then you get close to, well, there's no difference in the two parties, when there clearly is.
But that's a big dividing line to have them agree on things.
That's a big issue to have the Republicans and Democrats agree on things.
What just happened here?
What just happened?
Let me spell it out for you.
We just had the second midterm landslide, however you want to call it victory for the Republicans, defeat for the Democrats.
Either way, both are true.
The Democrat Party in 2010 lost 700 combined seats all over the country.
Massive similar size losses last November.
The American people finally sent the Democrats packing in the Senate, and next month the Republicans are going to run that.
The Republicans are going to run the House, they're going to run the Senate.
There's not a single Democrat senator left who voted for Obamacare.
Every one of them is gone.
The American people clearly have gone to the polls twice in midterm elections and said, stop this.
What just happened today or yesterday?
The House Republicans just fully funded Obama's amnesty, at least up, well, Homeland Security up to February 27th, and fully funded Obamacare.
They had a clear opportunity to say, nope, we're not going to let Democrats write next year's budget or the remainder of this year's.
This budget year stuff gets confusing because the when I say next year, I mean next calendar year.
We don't have a budget.
Well, we didn't, beyond December 11th tomorrow.
And so the question was, okay, do we come up with a budget, an omnibus, it's called, that will define United States spending through all of next year through September 30th, or do we do one for just a month or two?
And then when we are sworn in and run both houses of Congress, then we do the budget for the remainder of the year with our values in it and our economic beliefs in it.
Well, they didn't do that.
They essentially threw away all of next year.
And let Harry Reid have pretty much what he wanted.
The Democrats got pretty much what they wanted in this budget.
In fact, Harry Reed got a lot of pork for uh constituents of his in November.
And Obamacare fully funded.
No new money was added, but there wasn't any effort to defund elements of it or repeal any of it.
Not to say they won't try it next year, but they didn't do it this time.
Because there is this mythical, this mythical monster called the government shutdown that was going to eat up all these Republicans if they didn't give the Democrats.
After the Democrats have lost two landslide elections, the Republican Party thought if they didn't let the Democrats run this show, the Republicans were going to be hated because they had a poll.
They had a poll.
It said if there's a government shutdown, the Republicans are going to get blamed for it.
They had one last year, too.
Said the same thing.
Republicans won the Senate this year and added seats in the House, despite being responsible for the shutdown last year.
So where is the evidence that the Republicans in any way are willing to fight for a belief in smaller government?
Don't see it yet.
Don't see it yet.
And by the way, they haven't lost the support of the Chamber of Commerce.
They haven't lost the support of major Wall Street Republican donors.
This is right along what they wanted.
Crony corporatism or crony socialism.
Both parties will play ball in that, and their donors love it both ways.
Republicans and Democrats.
I have to take a break here because I'm long and I'm going to get a throat clear here from a broadcast engineer in a moment if I don't stop.
So back in a second.
We're back.
Here's John Boehner, by the way, Speaker of the House.
This morning at a QA at a press conference, uh, basically defending the budget bill.
And I want you to listen to him and what he says is the big achievement here.
What they're all celebrating over.
All these provisions in this bill have been worked out in a bipartisan bicameral fashion, or they wouldn't be in the bill.
It takes this long to put this bill together.
When you look at the number of agreements that had to be struck on funding levels, uh, on writers, uh, and other provisions, there's a lot in this bill.
And uh the appropriators did a frankly a marvelous job.
So you see, the bragging rights here.
Well, hey, all the provisions here have been worked out in a bipartisan fashion.
Well, they wouldn't be in the bill.
Yeah, we got we worked with the Democrats.
Unspoken is that's what the American people want us to do.
That's what these establishment Republicans run around and publicly say that they believe the election results mean.
That people are tired of gridlock, they want us working together, so the Republicans think they've really scored some points here.
Oh, yeah, they're running bragging about it.
Well, we do we got a budget for all of next year, and we worked with the Democrats on it.
Look, it can happen.
Except that's not what the election was about.
The Republicans were elected by people who want this stuff to stop.
And they simply don't hear that.
So you can see that there's no there's no fealty there to smaller government or any kind of principle or what have you.
No, bipartisanship.
That's what they seek credit for.
Another screeching halt.
Yet another excursion into broadcast excellence, but it's just a brief time out here, my friends.
We got Obama comparing Mary and Joseph to illegal immigrants.
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