Rush Limbaugh Program - December 24, 2014, Wednesday, Hour #2

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Dec. 24, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program

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December 24, 2014, Wednesday, Hour #2

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	Happy to be joining you here on Christmas Eve, Buck Sexton in for Rush today.
	Might have seen me as the caller said on Fox on the Blaze TV, where I am a host, formerly of the NYPD Intelligence Division and also of the Central Intelligence Agency, where I focused on Iraq and Afghanistan, more specifically extremist jihadists, I guess all jihadists are extremists, but nonetheless in Iraq and Afghanistan.
	So I wanted to take a few minutes of your time to talk about what's happening over there because the administration doesn't seem to care very much at all about what's happening, and I think that's pretty clear from both the policies and the tone and tenor of statements coming out of the White House about everything going on in Iraq and across the broader Middle East.
	Now, at the end of the year, national security wonks often come up with these lists.
	I know the Council on Foreign Relations has one, and there's some other organizations too.
	And they look at what they would consider to be the primary national security challenges for the following year.
	So you can already see there's a bunch of these lists out there.
	But what's fascinating to me is not so much the predictions that they're making for the next year, because nobody can predict the future, and it's often luck when somebody really nails a prediction.
	Sometimes people get it right, but very hard to tell what the uh what the future of the world looks like, obviously.
	But if you look at the previous year, because there's no place really that we can point to now that's a major national security concern with the possible exception of Ukraine that wasn't at the start of 2014.
	That's a way of getting yourself in the mindset of how would you scorecard the Obama administration at this point in time on national security for the past year, looking at all these different issues.
	Egypt, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Israel.
	Look at all these different places that have distinct national security challenges, and what you will see is a more clear legacy of failure, a more obviously negative trajectory than in perhaps any other aspect of the administration.
	It might not affect you day-to-day as much.
	It might not be something that you might care about as much as the growing statism and authoritarianism of this government under this president.
	Nonetheless, it's worth us paying close attention to because that has impact on all the other stuff that we do care about here, and also wow, they have done a bad job.
	And even their staunchest defenders now sort of shirk away from oh, the propaganda duty of saying, well, the president, you know, he's he's uh guy who likes to think about these things.
	I don't like to jump into things.
	I can sit around, have a little talk, talk to my friends, and I'm like, well, what can we do about this?
	I got an idea.
	We could not do anything, and then keep not doing anything.
	And then when things go bad, say, I'm sorry, that I do anything.
	Aloha.
	That's one way to go.
	That's one way to approach national security issues abroad is to do the absolute bare minimum necessary to look like you're paying attention and you care, and I think that's probably one of the better ways to try to put a framework up for this administration's policies, right?
	That's how you actually get a sense of what's going on.
	But in Iraq and Syria specifically, what you're seeing is a slow roll of the failure that has come from an administration that chose not only to pull out our troops, but also just try to wipe its hands clean of the entire issue, right?
	And you've seen a complete collapse of the good war-bad war paradigm, which Obama ran on and Clinton tried to hop on the bandwagon too, and she will again soon.
	Well, I voted before for Iraq and Hillary's going to be saying all this stuff, too, so just get ready for that.
	But Iraq and Afghanistan now are both conflicts that the administration has handled with an absolute uh an absolutely amateur touch.
	Doesn't just don't know what they're doing.
	Just and when they do know what they're doing, it's generally pretty bad.
	For example, the Islamic State, which calls itself a caliphate, and increasingly that's not something that can be just sort of sneered at out of hand.
	They are controlling an area of territory that is contiguous across an international boundary from Syria into Iraq.
	It encompasses uh a pretty sizable chunk of territory and has a few million people now.
	Maybe three or four million people, maybe five, that are under the uh that are under the general aegis of, or under the general um, I should say, totalitarianism of the Islamic State.
	So they're actually all there, right?
	They're actually all controlled by this entity.
	And it just shot down a Jordanian plane over Syria.
	That just happened in the past twenty-four hours.
	So keep in mind that not only are our air strikes at a slower pace than previous air campaigns intended to bring about some kind of policy change or some kind of on the ground shift.
	If you look at what we did in the Balkans, the amount of ordinance drop there versus what's happening now in Iraq, you can see very clearly that this is this is a sort of drip-by-drip bare minimum approach.
	The idea is we're not going to defeat the Islamic State, but we're going to keep it from overrunning Baghdad and larger parts of the country because that would look bad for the Democratic Party and the Democrats.
	So we're flying planes, and we have some allies flying planes, like Jordan, Jordan, which has been is often the sort of overlooked close ally of the United States in the Middle East.
	People talk about our allies, and you know, first is Israel, and then we we're like, well, sometimes the Saudis are kind of helpful, but they're really not helpful a lot of the time.
	And you break it down into the different countries, and you can do your who's our best play the Who's Our Best Middle East Ally game.
	It's a complicated one.
	Uh Jordan often gets overlooked, but they're actually on policy matters generally very helpful.
	And they had a plane shot down, and now that pilot is in uh the captivity of the Islamic State, and we all know what that could mean.
	Hopefully not.
	Uh but the butchers of ISIS uh have another bargaining chip, and if nothing else, certainly a propaganda tool that they can now deploy for their own purposes, and they will.
	This is now an apostate regime, which is how they view, which is what they uh how they refer to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
	They have an apostate regime uh soldier, or in this case, pilot, airman, in their in their custody, and they're going to make a big show of this.
	Because the longer they continue on, the longer they exist as an entity, the harder it's going to be to dislodge them.
	And this idea that because they're not taking additional territory, somehow they've been stopped or they've been halted in their tracks, which is what the Obama administration wants you to believe is garbage.
	It is not even vaguely accurate.
	Now let me tell you why.
	You see, the last time we faced off against jihadists in Iraq, and I know now this is Iraq and Syria because the problem has been allowed to metastasize.
	The last time we faced off against them, there were two critical turning points.
	The decision to surge more U.S. troops into the the into the theater of war, the surge, as we called it, which many Democrats, of course, opposed.
	And I can tell you that I know of some Democrats still in Congress who sort of looked disappointed when they got the news when they got the data that the surge had actually worked.
	It did work.
	But there was also a turning of the Iraqi people against these extremist forces.
	It's generally referred to as the awakening.
	Well, the Wall Street Journal has a piece out now on what's happening to our allies who are left behind, those who were police officers, those who were local leaders in some capacity, those who stood up alongside the Iraqi government and our troops who are trying to help the Iraqi government,
	those who stood up and whether you bel by the way, whether you think the war was a good idea or not, whether you think that we were uh doing well and it stabilized it before Barack Obama came to office or not, that shouldn't affect this decision or this um indifference really.
	And it's the indifference to those who risked their lives to assist us in a c in our cause over there.
	Iraqis.
	And they are stuck in this limbo where they think maybe they'll be able to reach out and they'll get some sort of help.
	And uh there's there's heartbreaking stuff that you can read in this piece because obviously we live in a globally connected world, and communications allow for some of these Iraqis to actually reach out to those in in the military that they were shoulder to shoulder with working on these issues.
	And some of those of those issues, some of those emails, are really difficult to read now because there's a pretty clear sense that these Iraqis, many of these Iraqis have been completely abandoned, and there's nothing the administration's going to do about it.
	And by the way, we're going to trend, we're going to turn, turn it around in just a second and look at, oh, okay, so the president will bend over backwards and distort the constitution, shred the constitution for illegal immigrants just.
	Hashtag power politics.
	Just cause.
	But in Iraq, those who, and you can you can look and see who's who's telling the stories about this.
	This isn't just the Iraqis saying this.
	There are men who served our Marines, our soldiers, our army on the ground.
	And they will tell you that some of these Iraqis deserve some help.
	They deserve, uh, they deserve us at least trying to keep them out of the hangman's noose, or in this case, actually, the the butcher's knife that ISIS uses against those who are considered collaborators.
	So why did I say that ISIS, just that it's stopping in its geographic push, that doesn't mean that it's not getting stronger.
	It is consolidating what it has now, and it's doing that by rooting out collaborators by finding those who assisted us the last time around and pushing out the jihadists.
	It was a marked marked defeat for the Islam.
	I mean, well, what was at that time Al Qaeda in Iraq.
	Al Qaeda and Iraq then became what is now the Islamic State.
	Um Zarqawi was replaced by Al Baghdadi.
	But they are now consolidating.
	They're going into different towns and villages and cities.
	And what they're doing is making sure that there's no real opposition we can rely on there.
	So this idea that we're going to use our allies on the ground to be our boots on the ground.
	There aren't going to be any allies with boots left at the current pace.
	They're going into different cities, cities you know well in Anbar.
	They're going into Western Iraq, and they're finding those.
	And it's not hard to do because of all the press reports, because of all the stuff that's out there about who is standing beside us.
	Who was an ally to the United States during a time of war in this country and an essential period when we actually did turn the tide.
	They're finding them.
	The Islamic State is tracking them down and killing them.
	This sends a message, obviously, to everyone else in these areas as well.
	Defy us and you die.
	What are we doing about any of this?
	Not very much at all.
	The Obama administration's gambit here, as far as I can see, is to just keep this thing from completely boiling over.
	More than it already has, by the way.
	Essentially keep Baghdad from being completely under siege and then hand it off to the next administration.
	This is sort of the old Clinton gambit.
	Just, you know, do whatever you gotta do to hand it off to the next guy, but don't do anything that requires making any hard choices.
	I do not like to make hard choices.
	I would rather just drink and hang out with some ladies.
	It's just not my thing.
	I'm gonna hand it over to W. Of course we know what happened after that.
	Clinton wouldn't make those hard decisions.
	Always try to do it in sort of a multilateral minimist fashion.
	Obama's approach to national security has been look, uh, I'm smarter than the other guy, so I'll just figure it out.
	I'm not gonna do stupid stuff.
	And as we see, man, he's doing a lot of stupid stuff.
	Mistakes across the board.
	Back to the uh initial premise, by the way.
	Find me the place where we have counterterrorism concerns, find me the place where we have national security issues that we must confront.
	Because remember, these groups are saying they're gonna hit the homeland.
	And find me the place where the Obama administration has actually had any success whatsoever.
	Find me one.
	Call in.
	I'm serious.
	Tell me.
	800 282 2882.
	Tell me where this place is.
	A legacy of consistent failure on these issues.
	This is Buck Sexton Infor Rush Limbaugh.
	Facebook.com slash Buck Sexons, where you can send me some messages and thoughts, or at Buck Sexton on Twitter.
	I will be right back.
	Buck Sexton here in for Rush Limbaugh today.
	You can send me a message at Facebook.com slash Buck Sexton or on Twitter at Buck Sexton.
	Now some of you may have seen this.
	It's not getting much attention yet, but sort of keeping in with our national security theme for this hour.
	It's now it's now out there that the shooter, as he's referred to, uh O'Neill, the shooter of bin Laden, that they're going after him.
	They're going after him for leaking.
	Now, let's just, and this is something that I know a bit about because my time in the agency was always drummed into us that if you leak anything, they're going to completely annihilate you, and understandably so when it's an actual leak.
	But this gets very political very quickly.
	This all of a sudden changes pretty dramatically depending on who is doing the leaking.
	Let me tell you what I mean.
	There's also and when I say leaking, it's also say national security information in general and how it's handled and who gives it, who takes it, where it is.
	You have sources on Capitol Hill now who are saying that Alyssa Starzak, who is a staffer on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, SSCI, that she took a report that was a CI classified study from the agency from the CIA without permission, without authorization.
	Now to do that under certain circumstances is illegal, and at a minimum it could bring about the loss of a security clearance.
	But she's being pushed all the way up the chain, because I'm sure she did her job with the CIA so-called torture report.
	Right.
	She did her thing for the Democrats there, and so now she's essentially protected from on high.
	Meanwhile, Navy SEAL O'Neill shot bin Laden, come out, comes out and talks about bin Laden.
	We've seen the movie, we've seen Zero Dark 30.
	We're pretty familiar with the raid.
	Because the Obama administration was doing a big victory dance and spiking the football as soon as they could on this, didn't wait at all like we got bin Laden.
	Or rather, I'm sorry, it was President Obama.
	I got bin Laden.
	I'll jump through the roof and I repelled down and I took out my MP Kalajnikov.
	And then uh I did a little karate chop and I got bin Laden myself.
	It was amazing.
	It was like total total uh smooth stuff.
	It was great.
	Remember, he said I mean my about a million times when the whole Bin Laden raid thing came down.
	And now we have the shooter and they're investigating him.
	And look, the process is the punishment with this stuff.
	Understand that.
	Even if at the end of this, and I do think the administration might just have a tough time putting away a Hero Navy SEAL for leaking classified.
	But I could be wrong because the Obama administration loves to leak secrets, but also punish the leakers of secrets.
	It depends on who does it.
	They act in this regard, they do act like sort of third world, third rate dictators.
	You know, they have an inner circle of cronies that can get away with almost anything, do whatever, do whatever they want.
	They can leak, they can talk to the press, they can do their thing.
	But the moment that somebody else maybe causes a problem or steps out of line, sets a precedent for others to speak out or speak up, they get hammered.
	Remember, this administration has been described by left-wing journalists as the biggest uh the biggest opponents of the First Amendment in memory.
	They have prosecuted more people, and this is a statistic.
	This should never leave your brain.
	You should be thinking about this.
	Anytime President Obama speaks about oh, journalism and uh First Amendment, I love it, it's great.
	Uh they have prosecuted more people under the Espionage Act than every other presidential administration before combined.
	Combined.
	And this is a sort of statistic that's only rivaled by the fact that President Obama has added more to the national debt than any president before him.
	So he is number one in some regards.
	He is getting it done, I suppose, when it comes to the record books.
	It's just the record books that you don't want to be in.
	But here they are.
	They're going to try to sneak sneak through a little a little intimidation at a minimum of some Navy SEALs here.
	But bureaucrats who do their political duty by the White House, do their political duty by the Democrats, they never get in trouble.
	They will always, always get bailed out.
	And that's just what we can expect from these guys.
	More coming.
	Buck Sexton be right back.
	It is indeed Buck Sexton in for Rush today here on the EIB.
	Thank you so much for joining, for staying with me.
	Um and we have the lines open.
	800 282 2882.
	Let's take Jim in Saratoga Springs.
	Jim, this is the Rush Limbaugh Show.
	You're speaking to Buck.
	Jim.
	I think I don't hear Jim.
	Do you guys hear Jim?
	Oh?
	Nope.
	Let's go to uh Dave in Maryland.
	Dave, hopefully we can hear you.
	Mr. Sexton, how are you, sir?
	Good, sir.
	How are you?
	I'm doing well.
	We chewed a lot of the same sand overseas.
	Oh, indeed.
	Yes.
	Anbar, unfortunately, is never lovely this time of year, but nonetheless, thank you for calling in.
	I I was with a provincial reconstruction team, both with the uh Army and the State Department.
	Oh, the PRT.
	I remember it well.
	I hope uh I hope you have in province.
	Thank you so much for your service, first and foremost, and I hope you're having a good holiday season.
	So what's on your mind, Dave?
	My question for you, sir is General Abdella was a deputy governor of Soladin Province.
	I don't know if you knew him or not.
	I he was a good friend of mine.
	I I I can't speak to any specific individuals overseas, but please continue with uh whatever's on your mind.
	Well, they assassinated him about a year and a half ago.
	He was a national hero, like an Audi Murphy of Iraq uh during the Iran-Iraq war.
	And they assassinated him in prep just prepping, getting the well getting rid of the political leaders uh in preparation for ISIS.
	And I'm kind of kicking myself for not picking up on that.
	But did the CIA know?
	I mean, that was a pretty obvious one in retrospect, and I'm that's my view from the couch.
	I I'm I don't have a seat at Langley.
	Well, I've been out for years, for one.
	So that's just I I've been out of the agency for for a number of years now.
	But as to the broader issue of what's happening throughout Iraq, anybody who worked with um U.S. military in any capacity is a huge target now.
	I mean, uh Dave, are you in contact with any of of your the people you worked with?
	Uh they must be um you know Saladin is not as bad as as Anbar is right now.
	I mean, Anbar, there's there's open warfare in Fallujah for who's gonna be in control.
	ISIS is taking control.
	And they've shot down a jet.
	I mean, ISIS is having a banner day, nobody's paying much attention to it.
	Have you had any contacts overseas that have reached out to you and said we're really worried they're they're taking the they're taking our town or they're gonna march on Baghdad?
	And what are you hearing?
	My interpreter, Bob just got arrested.
	You know how you nickname all these interpreters.
	Uh he just got arrested by ISIS, so I don't expect him to live long.
	So we'll uh let's let's let's drop Dave for a second.
	I can't I can't hear him, so we'll just um uh Oh, D Dave?
	Sorry, I I yeah.
	Um arrested my uh interpreter, Bob.
	They arrested your interpreter?
	Yeah, just recently.
	I mean, I haven't been there since 08.
	Uh but uh yeah, he just got arrested the other day, and he probably won't live long.
	He's a great guy, too.
	I'm terribly Jerry Von, I'm sorry I couldn't hear we we cut out there for one second, but uh I'm terribly sorry to hear about that.
	But that's exactly what this Wall Street Journal piece is all about, and we're not doing we're not doing anything, it seems, to help those that uh anybody who lived, and I was out in two's Carmado, uh South of Kirkuk there, and the Kurds love us, but we've really let them go.
	Uh anybody who's anybody just um they went to Fellujah.
	Uh I'm sorry, uh, to um Salomonia.
	They fled.
	Yeah, well, Kurdistan is now the one sanctuary, but it was a sanctuary back in the old bad days of the insurgency post 2003 as well.
	I mean, Kurdistan has always been this island of normalcy with all the fighting and all the violence going on around it.
	Although, as you know, it got pretty it got pretty hairy, It got pretty scary up there in the north um just a few months ago, and that's what really brought that's what really forced our hand, I think, to actually act between the stranding of the Yazidis on Mount Sinjar and then uh also the possibility of Erbil falling to the Islamic State.
	That was a way that's what I mean.
	People say it's not our problem.
	At some point it actually does become our problem.
	Oh, it certainly does.
	And I was also on Zormat in Afghanistan.
	I'm sure you're familiar with that.
	Uh yes, sir, sir.
	So uh we got a Dave, thank you very much for calling in.
	We're gonna move to uh Steve in Springfield.
	Steve, uh this is the Rush Limbaugh show, you're speaking to Buck.
	How are you doing today?
	Good.
	You were looking for one example of a success for the Obama administration, uh for foreign policy success.
	I don't know how you couldn't hold up uh Russia as a a good example in six years with the policies of this administration, um economically and foreign policy wise, we've got oil at a point now where it's breaking the Russian economy.
	And uh, you know, that wouldn't have happened had we kept the same policies we had for eight years.
	Uh well, Steve, you've got Russia, uh Russia's annexed Crimea, Russia has waged a in a covert insurgency, well, it's not even really covert, they've been running tanks across the border.
	They've been running an insurgency in eastern Ukraine, and uh the Russian people, despite the economic pain they feel, the latest AP poll uh shows eighty percent support for Putin.
	So he's consolidating power despite the economic pain that they're feeling, and the Europeans, by the way, are getting pretty sick, I think, pretty quickly, of the issues that they're having to deal with.
	So I'm not I don't know why you think it's a it's people are actually worried now that Putin's been put in a box, you know, he's been put in a corner, and as I say, nobody puts Putin in a corner.
	And he may actually you like that, thank you.
	I don't know how you can argue both sides of the uh the argument, though.
	We saw a few years ago it was Obama was not harsh enough on Russia and Putin, and now what we're doing is actually bringing them to his knees.
	I don't understand what's the right thing.
	Well that's but see that there's an oversimplification though.
	What I see is not harsh enough.
	I'm just saying they're they're failing.
	I mean, you have the most powerful government with the most powerful military in the world, and somehow all of these problems, all these crises that exist around the world, uh, we haven't had any resolution.
	In fact, we haven't had improvement in any of them.
	I mean, the the biggest, the most dramatic failures have been in places like uh Iraq and Syria.
	And the Obama administration's brilliant policy for Syria has basically been let it just turn into a giant cauldron of violence and uh a civil war that's claimed now over two hundred thousand lives.
	Don't really do much of anything there, and then just sort of say, well, at least um at least I haven't made it worse.
	Well, now we've got a giant terrorist group operating.
	Actually, we have numerous terrorist groups operating there.
	We have Jabat al Nusra, the official franchise of Al Qaeda, we have the Islamic State, and there's other extremist groups that are peppered in there as well.
	Um so I d I don't know how they can view that as a uh as any kind of a victory, but on Russia, uh remember there was a Russian reset.
	And look, if you want me to talk about Bush administration foreign policies, we could do that too, although I have not unlimited time today.
	Uh the Obama administration, though, thought that they could figure things out with Putin.
	If you remember the discussion with Medvedev, where he said that he would have more flexible Obama would have more flexibility after his election, and he's shown a lot of flexibility, just like he's shown a lot of flexibility with Cuba, and he's shown a lot of flexibility with Iran.
	And basically every time somebody comes up against our interests, the White House's brilliant strategy is cave.
	I mean, this is like, you know, a constant strategic withdrawal.
	Uh, but thank you for calling in, Steve, from Springfield.
	So where are we here?
	I can go a little more on on some of this.
	Um I just think that oh, well, Russia's is fascinating to me.
	On that point, um, on that point of what's going on with Putin now.
	Yes, the economy is having a lot of trouble.
	They've got over a hundred billion dollars of capital flight, and it seems like a recession is imminent.
	There's certainly in an economic slowdown, but it seems like a rush a recession is imminent.
	Um, with all of that going, you would think that there'd be a major reversal in policy.
	And Putin actually gave a speech that it was just last week, in which some thought that maybe he would all of a sudden uh shift gears and decide that he play a little nicer with the international community.
	And that is not what happened at all.
	I mean, he gave a speech in which he and I'm not I'm not exaggerating here, he did things like say, you know, Russia is like a bear, and some people they want to chain the bear, and they want the bear to eat honey and berry.
	Uh, but the bear cannot be chained because this is not good.
	So the bear is loose.
	The bear is loose, everybody.
	I mean, that's this is what he's saying.
	The bear is loose.
	The bear is on the bear is uh on a rampage doing whatever it wants.
	And when your entire support domestically is based upon a sort of nationalism and a reconstitution of the former Soviet Union, which is in slow motion what's happening.
	Georgia, Crimea, Eastern Ukraine, um, the primarily Russian uh primarily Russian speaking regions of Ukraine.
	Um the Baltics are probably next.
	The Baltics get almost all of their energy, by the way, from Russia, so how hard is it for them to exert some influence there?
	All of a sudden they're just like, sorry, bro, no more natural gas.
	This is a rough day.
	Uh and now you're freezing in Estonia or Latvia or Lithuania in the middle of winter because your politicians are part of NATO and you know they just gotta stand up and man up and deal with it, I suppose.
	So there's a lot of ways for them to put pressure on things.
	All right.
	That's the call in here.
	Buck Sexton in for Rush Limbaugh.
	You can go to Facebook.com slash Buck Sexton.
	Let's talk North Korea for a few minutes.
	That'll be fun.
	Back in a minute.
	Tuck Sexton here in for Rush Limbaugh today on the EIB on Christmas Eve.
	Thank you so much for joining me.
	You can go to Facebook.com slash Buck Sexton, you can send me messages there.
	Um also at Buck Sexton on Twitter.
	I live tweet throughout the show, so you can talk to me while I'm here, while I'm on air.
	Or you can call in.
	The number's 800-282-2882.
	So North Korea.
	North Korea and the Sony hacking.
	Another chapter uh today in this.
	Sony has confirmed that it will in fact be distributing the interview, which of course you can't ever bring this up without pointing out that this movie is apparently horrible even by uh James Franco standards or James Flacco, depending on who you ask.
	Uh the movie's supposedly not supposedly not very good.
	It is certainly not the classic of American cinema that Team America is.
	This goes without saying.
	Um but they're going to release this.
	They're going to distribute it online and on demand.
	Uh so that's been a reversal a reversal of the earlier decision.
	Um and it will be available.
	Oh, wait, it'll be available Wednesday at uh one PM Eastern time on YouTube, Google, um, Google Play, Xbox, and on a Sony site.
	This is according to The Guardian.
	So we've turned this whole thing, it seems, right now, a little bit around.
	Although I'd like to point out that there's more oh, there's more complications in this than just okay, they're showing the movie.
	Uh first of all, the the idea of the US losing even a battle in a broader cyber war to a country that doesn't really have the internet feels weird.
	I think we should just get that out there.
	It feels weird.
	And then the possibility that someone, we don't know who, we're just at hey, we're just asking questions here.
	That somebody shut down North Korea's internet, kicking off at least fifteen or sixteen people from the internet when that happened in response.
	That's kind of an that's kind of uh a weak a weak comeback.
	It's like, oh yeah, North Korea, we're gonna shut down your internet.
	I don't think Kim Jong-un is quaking over that one.
	Um so the decision about what to do with North Korea is one thing, but now of course you've got Sony as sort of the um the first am the first amendment heroes of the day, or not heroes, but at least they're not going to be the butt of so many jokes anymore on this.
	I think what's interesting is that somehow they were able to get away with uh having their lawyers claim that they were going to go after anybody who published the leaked information.
	Um which that so now they're standing up for the First Amendment uh, except now remember there's a difference between stealing information and looking at information.
	There's a difference between reading a new story and leaking the information for the new story.
	They were saying they were gonna go after anybody.
	Anybody who would uh put this stuff out there who would share it on social media.
	Uh and this has a weird totalitarian twang to it, you know.
	Oh, okay, so you're telling me that if I know about Something, I can't talk about it.
	Hmm.
	It does feel a bit like North Korea, doesn't it?
	That's not something that we should take lightly, this idea that you can be held liable.
	I'm not talking about the people that stole the information, cyber hacking, theft, and all that.
	But once it's out there in the public domain, there's no putting there's no putting the genie back in the bottle.
	That can't happen.
	And the government sometimes tries this.
	The government will say, well, something can still it's still classified even if it's out there in the public domain.
	Which is just nonsense.
	In fact, they'll even sometimes say that when a senior government official comes out there, when Obama's like, I'm doing this real sacred thing, but it's really cool.
	What's up, kids?
	I'm here in a Google chat.
	We're hanging out, talking to you about a little classified stuff.
	No biggie.
	Aloha.
	And um that's that somehow doesn't break through.
	That all of a sudden the president can say something.
	He reads the PDB every day, he knows everything that well, at least in theory, has access to everything that's going on in the clandestine world of government, but even if he says something sometimes, they say, well, I'm not sure it's really declassified.
	For the private sector to take this up now and start telling us that we can't share information, or we can't acknowledge information that is already out there is really problematic.
	So that somehow that just sort of skated along.
	Oh yeah, Sony, they're gonna sue people that sue people that uh post this to their Facebook page.
	Oh, okay.
	But on the other hand, they're the champions of the First Amendment.
	That's right, sir.
	We're going to release this online.
	And yeah, I'm gonna download this thing in solidarity with free speech, and I know people point out that the First Amendment is actually a doctrine that is constitutional to U.S. persons and US territory, but it's also a broader we use it as a shorthand for a broader concept of the freedom to share ideas and openness and debate and all the rest of it.
	So it looks like uh we're not going to well, I shouldn't say we Sony is not going to necessarily bend the knee entirely to Kim Jong-un's regime.
	But what shouldn't be lost in all this is that when it comes to what we're going to do in response to this, or what we'll do in response to Chinese government hacking or any other government hacking for that matter, from the countries that are capable of really doing it in a way that's effective and therefore damaging, we don't really we don't really have a response.
	Sanctions?
	How much more are you going to sanction North Korea?
	I mean, the lights are already out at night, my friends.
	What are we going to do?
	And by sanctioning them, you they're they're already willing to starve their own people.
	In the words of Christopher Hitchens, a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave below it.
	So how are you going to punish that country with just diplomacy?
	I mean, you can try, I suppose it's worth giving it a shot, but I don't think it's going to be very effective.
	And I don't think we have any ideas of or any idea of what we can do that would stop, actually put a stop to this sort of stuff from Russia, from China, from any of the countries that have this capability.
	And by the way, North Korea apparently didn't have this capability until now.
	Hey, all of a sudden, whoa, a year ago, no way North Korea could do this.
	Now, eh.
	A little bit.
	I'm going to say uh a little North Korea, a little bit hacking skills.
	They figured it out.
	And so now here we are.
	Formerly of the axis of evil, now administration, it's more of like the uh axis of misunderstood.
	800 282-2882 on the phone lines here.
	We'll take some calls.
	Facebook.com slash Buck Sexton or at Bucks Exton on Twitter.
	Live tweeting and live Facebooking.
	I don't know if that's a verb, but we'll make it up.
	Right?
	Why not?
	Throughout the show, uh I'll be back in a minute.
	Fuck sex in for Rush Limbaugh today on the EIB.
	Christmas Eve.
	It's that time of year.
	Uh something you're not going to see a lot of coverage of, but I think it's worth worth mentioning briefly.
	Remember how the French set up a 75% super tax?
	It is the tax city super because it is so large, it is so magnifique, it is so incroyable.
	Because this was the idea, right?
	Wealth redistribution, you got all this.
	You got the socialist O Lond, not to be confused with Kaiser Wilhelm in New York, also a socialist, but a different kind of socialist.
	American socialist.
	and now you have uh the French backing away from the 75% tax.
	Who knew this would happen?
	Who thought this was possible?
	They're just sort of saying, oops, didn't bring much revenue, scared away high earners, hurt businesses.
	What a shock.
	You mean high taxes won't just make up for all your debts?
	This is incredible I am so upset about this.
	Imf if I ever thought for one second it was possible that we would not have the super tax in a year, quirk a spit in the super taxes general direction.

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