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Dec. 24, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:38
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.
You 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.
And so I want 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 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 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 a guy who likes to think about these things.
I don't like to jump into things.
I like to sit around, have a little talk, talk to my friends.
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, did 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 is 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, an absolutely amateur touch.
Doesn't just don't know what they're doing.
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 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 general aegis of, or under the general, 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's just happened in the past 24 hours.
So keep in mind that not only are our airstrikes 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.
And if you look at what we did in the Balkans, the amount of ordinance dropped there versus what's happening now in Iraq, you can see very clearly that 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 this 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 were 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.
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 the captivity of the Islamic State, and we all know what that could mean.
Hopefully not.
But the butchers of ISIS 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 how they refer to the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan.
They have an apostate regime soldier, or in this case, pilot, airman, 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 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 believe, by the way, whether you think the war was a good idea or not, whether you think that we were doing well and it stabilized it before Barack Obama came to office or not, that shouldn't affect this decision or this indifference, really.
And it's the indifference to those who risked their lives to assist us 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 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 the military that they were shoulder to shoulder with working on these issues.
And some 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 is going to do about it.
And by the way, we're going to 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 cause.
Hashtag power politics, just because.
But in Iraq, those who, and you can look and see 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 us at least trying to keep them out of the hangman's noose, or in this case, actually, 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 market defeat for the Islamic, well, what was at that time al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq then became what is now the Islamic State.
And 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 got to 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 going to 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 de minimis fashion.
Obama's approach to national security has been: look, I'm smarter than the other guys, so I'll just figure it out.
I'm not going to do stupid stuff.
And as we see, man, he's doing a lot of stupid stuff.
Mistakes across the board.
Back to the 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 going to 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 in for Rush Limbaugh, Facebook.com/slash Buck Sextons, 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 BuckSexton or on Twitter at BuckSexton.
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 out there that the shooter, as he's referred to, 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.
Me tell you what I mean.
There's also, and when I say leaking, let'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.
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, 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 jumped through the roof and I rappelled down and I took out my MP Kalazhnikov.
And then I did a little karate chop and I got bin Laden myself.
It was amazing.
It was like total, total smooth stuff.
It was great.
Remember, he said I, me, 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 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 opponents of the First Amendment in memory.
They have prosecuted more people.
And this should never leave your brain.
You should be thinking about this.
Anytime President Obama speaks about, oh, journalism and the First Amendment, I love it.
It's great.
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 through 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.
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 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 was with the provincial reconstruction team, both for the Army and the State Department.
Oh, the PRT.
I remember it well.
I hope you have.
Saladin 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 Abdullah was the deputy governor of Saladin Province.
I don't know if you knew him or not.
He was a good friend of mine.
I can't speak to any specific individuals overseas, but please continue with 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 during the Iran-Iraq war.
And they assassinated him in prep, just prepping, getting rid of the political leaders in preparation for ISIS.
And I'm kind of kicking myself for not picking up on that.
But did the CIA know?
I mean, it was a pretty obvious one in retrospect.
And that's my view from the couch.
I don't have a seat at Langley.
Well, I've been out for years, for one.
So I've been out of the agency for a number of years now.
But as to the broader issue of what's happening throughout Iraq, anybody who worked with U.S. military in any capacity is a huge target now.
I mean, Dave, are you in contact with any of the people you worked with?
They must be not as bad as Anbar is right now.
I mean, Anbar, there's open warfare in Fallujah for who's going to 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 taking our town or they're going to march on Baghdad?
And what are you hearing?
My interpreter, Bob, just got arrested.
You know how you nickname these interpreters?
He just got arrested by ISIS.
So I don't expect him to live long.
So let's drop Dave for a second.
I can't hear him, so we'll just.
Oh, Dave?
Sorry.
Yeah.
They arrested my interpreter, Bob.
They arrested your interpreter?
Just recently.
Yeah, just recently.
I mean, I haven't been there since 08.
But, yeah, he just got arrested the other day, and he probably won't live long.
He's a great guy, too.
I'm terribly.
Dave, I'm sorry I couldn't hear.
We cut out there for one second, but 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 anything, it seems, to help those that are.
Anybody who lived, and I was out in Tuz Carmado, South of Kirkuk, there, and the Kurds love us, but we've really let them go.
Anybody who's anybody, just they went to Fallujah.
I'm sorry, to Salamania.
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.
As you know, it got pretty hairy.
It got pretty scary up there in the north 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 also the possibility of Erbil falling to the Islamic State.
That was a way.
See, 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.
Yes, sir.
So we got a Dave.
Thank you very much for calling in.
We're going to move to Steve in Springfield.
Steve, 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, a foreign policy success.
I don't know how you couldn't hold up Russia as a good example in six years with the policies of this administration.
Economically and foreign policy-wise, we've got oil at a point now where it's breaking the Russian economy.
And, you know, that wouldn't have happened had we kept the same policies we had for eight years.
Well, Steve, you've got Russia, Russia's annexed Crimea.
Russia has waged a covert insurgency.
It's not even really covert.
They've been running tanks across the border.
They've been running an insurgency in eastern Ukraine.
And the Russian people, despite the economic pain they feel, the latest AP poll shows 80% 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 don't know why you think it's a people are actually worried now that Putin's been put in a box.
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 argument, though.
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 that.
But see, there's an oversimplification.
What I see is not harsh enough.
I'm just saying 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, we haven't had any resolution.
In fact, we haven't had improvement in any of them.
I mean, the biggest, the most dramatic failures have been in places like 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 a civil war that's claimed now over 200,000 lives.
Don't really do much of anything there.
And then just sort of say, well, 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 Jabbat 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.
So I don't know how they can view that as any kind of a victory.
But on Russia, 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.
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 flexibility, 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.
But thank you for calling in, Steve, from Springfield.
So where are we?
I can go a little more on some of this.
I just think that, oh, well, Russia is fascinating to me.
On that point, on that point of what's going on with Putin now, yes, the economy is having a lot of trouble.
They're over $100 billion of capital flight, and it seems like a recession is imminent.
They're certainly in an economic slowdown, but it seems like a recession is imminent.
So with all of that going, you would think that there'd be a major reversal in policy.
And Putin actually gave a speech, it was just last week, in which some thought that maybe he would all of a sudden 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 exaggerating here, he did things like say, you know, Russia is like a bear, and some people, they want to chain bear, and they want the bear to eat honey and berry, but the bear cannot be chained because this is not good.
So the bear is loose.
The bear is loose, everybody.
I mean, this is what he's saying.
The bear is loose.
The bear is on the bear is 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, the primarily Russian, primarily Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine.
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.
It's a rough day.
And now you're freezing in Estonia or Latvia or Lithuania in the middle of winter because your politicians are part of NATO and they just got to 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.
800-282-2882.
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.
Buck 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 BuckSexton.
You can send me messages there.
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 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 James Franco standards or James Flacco, depending on who you ask.
The movie is supposedly not very good.
It is certainly not the classic of American cinema that Team America is.
This goes without saying.
But they're going to release this.
They're going to distribute it online and on demand.
So that's been a reversal, a reversal of the earlier decision.
And it will be available.
Oh, wait.
It'll be available Wednesday at 1 p.m. Eastern Time on YouTube, Google, 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.
First of all, the idea of the U.S. 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 asking questions here, that somebody shut down North Korea's internet, kicking off at least 15 or 16 people from the internet when that happened.
In response, that's kind of a weak comeback.
It's like, oh, yeah, North Korea, we're going to shut down your internet.
I don't think Kim Jong-un is quaking over that one.
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 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 having their lawyers claim that they were going to go after anybody who published the leaked information.
So now they're standing up for the First Amendment.
Except, now remember, there's a difference between stealing information and looking at information.
There's a difference between reading a news story and leaking the information for the news story.
They were saying they were going to go after anybody, anybody who would put this stuff out there, who would share it on social media.
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 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 really secret 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 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 going to sue people that sue people that 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 going to 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 U.S. 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 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 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, 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?
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 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 North Korea, a little bit hacking skills.
They figured it out.
And so now here we are.
Formerly of the Axis of Evil.
Now, Obama administration, it's more of like the Axis of misunderstood.
800-282-2882 on the phone lines here.
We'll take some calls.
Facebook.com/slash BuckSexton or at BuckSexton 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, I'll be back in a minute.
Buck Sexton in for Rush Limbaugh today on the EIB.
Christmas Eve.
It's that time of year.
Something you're not going to see a lot of coverage of, but I think it's worth mentioning briefly.
Remember how the French set up a 75% super tax?
It is the tax that is super because it is so large, it is so manifique, it is so encryable.
Because this was the idea, right?
Wealth redistribution.
You got all this.
You got the socialist Hollande.
Not to be confused with Kaiser Wilhelm in New York, also a socialist, but a different kind of socialist.
An American socialist.
And now you have 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 uncréable.
I am so upset about this.
If I ever thought for one second it was possible that we would not have the super tax in a year.
I spit in the super taxes general direction.
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