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Dec. 29, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:55
December 29, 2014, Monday, Hour #3
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We started something in the last hour on this program, and I want to continue it.
There is a very emotional reaction in America right now to what some people perceive as cop bashing.
That the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over one case, some perceive were used as an excuse for guys like Al Sharpton and others to get up and condemn every cop in America.
But there are others who believe that those who automatically, reflexively, defend the police officers, are giving an arm of government a pass that they wouldn't give to any other arm of government.
Most thirdly arguing with me off the air here, suggesting that police officers are never held accountable.
That when they are caught making a mistake, when there is excessive violence, that they never admit it.
He further argues that black people are far likelier to be targeted by police officers than white people.
He refers specifically to the situation to the situation in New York.
I've got some comments that I want to make on this, and then I want to invite Rush callers to weigh in it.
I'll give you the telephone number right now, 1-800-28282.
I think this.
We all know that a disproportionate amount of the violent crime in America is in the African-American communities.
Take out all the small town of the suburban police departments in America, and let's go into the big city departments because this is where the cases come from.
The majority of the calls they receive are into black families, Latino families, and so on.
That's where most of the responses are going to be.
So of course, there's a greater chance that if there is trouble, it's going to involve a police officer and a black suspect or a Latino suspect because that's where the majority of calls dealing with violence are.
The problem I have in simply lumping in and indicting and claiming the cops have it in for black people is I don't think you'd be a cop in a big city in America if you had it in for black people.
Look at what they're forced to deal with.
I'll tell you a couple of stories from my own community, Milwaukee.
This past summer, a little girl's playing on a playground.
Her name was Sierra, playing on a playground, and two gangbangers get involved in a gunfight, she's hit by a stray bullet and she's killed.
I wish we had one one millionth of passion directed against those killers as there were against the police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.
It does it doesn't happen.
We also had a situation just a few weeks ago where a house was targeted.
I don't know why they targeted it, but somebody fired a gunshot into a house.
Did they hit the drug dealer, whomever it was that they were targeting?
No.
They shot and killed a little girl who is sitting on her father or grandfather's lap.
No one was upset about that.
The people who have to go in and respond and deal with those things are police officers.
The domestic violence situations that they respond to in which they try to separate people and keep one person from killing one another, those are police officers.
The homes that they go into in which they see children that are victimized by bad mothers, too much drugs around, daddy's daddy's a gangbanger if daddy's involved at all, they're police officers.
I argue that if they didn't, as a group care, they wouldn't be doing that job.
And I also argue that the cases of violent confrontations between police officers and suspects are few and far between.
Are there cases of excessive force?
Well, of course there are probably cases of excessive force, just as every occupation we have in life has people who screw up.
There are plumbers who show up who don't fix the clogged raid.
There are lawyers who botch malpractice cases.
Sometimes you go to the doctor and he doesn't cure you, but that doesn't mean it's because they have it in for you because of your skin color.
I think guys like Sharpton who don't want to look at real problems in the African American community, pick out this one because the cop becomes an easy target.
Now, in response to this, you had about 20,000 police officers show up for the funeral over the weekend here in New York, and I'm doing the program from Russia's New York studio for the funeral of one of the two police officers who was shot, some believe because the mayor of New York stirred things up.
Cops showed up from all over the country.
When the mayor spoke at the funeral, the police officers who were watching on a monitor outside turned their backs on the mayor.
They were hacked off at him.
I think the police officers feel as though they're under siege and they're put upon.
One other thought that I have.
I think there is a presumption that if you're treated like you're a piece of crap by a police officer, then it's because of something.
Some cops are just jerks.
I'll think of one cop right now in Milwaukee.
He works the parking lot of an entrance of a major sporting venue in Milwaukee.
I mean, when he's out there directing preg, getting this line, getting that, he bends over backwards to be a jerk.
Go around this way.
I'm a white guy.
Were I black?
I might have presumed the reason he made me go all the way around because he thought I was in the wrong lane is because I'm black guy.
And maybe somebody who is black does get that treatment.
But this guy was just in general a guy who got off, I think, on yelling at people and shoving people around.
Confrontation involving a suspect.
Somebody shoves back and resists, white person.
You probably aren't going to hear much about it because it's just going to be a debate as to whether or not the cop was having a bad day or whether or not the white guy started it.
When it's an African American person, the issue of race gets introduced.
It's possible that some of these cases have nothing to do with skin color.
The one thing I grant you is like all entities of government, especially when there's unionization involved, there is a response, and it is institutionalized to go to bat to defend everyone.
For heaven's sakes, the National Football League Players Association went to bat for Ray Rice and for Adrian Peterson.
That's what unions do.
So it does make it look like there's this blue shield where they come and surround and support everyone in some cases where there probably should be action.
I just think we get exercised over cases that are aberrational, and you don't hear anything about the police officers who are going in there trying in areas that are very violent, in areas where there's a lot of dysfunction, where there's a lot of social problems, and sincerely want to help.
And that's why I don't like this, okay, the cops are out there, the cops don't like black people.
If that was the case, you'd have a lot more cases than the ones that we have.
I think the vast majority of police officers are good, heroic, and noble people, and a lot of ankle biters on the sidelines, like Sharpton, have used Ferguson, Missouri and a couple of other cases to come in and unfairly stir things up.
Well then I'll talk to him.
Let's go to Queens and Ryan.
Ryan, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hi, Mark.
It's uh great show.
Yeah, I uh I'm retired from uh NYPD, and I was a supervisor for years, and I worked in Harlem and I worked in Bed Sky.
I'm white.
And there was a uh I think with stopping the cops getting out of a car and stopping somebody, they're the cops who were involved in the community, they're the cops who really make a difference because they're out there looking to stop people who are carrying weapons.
Now, where I worked, there were very few white people.
And ironically enough, when we did see white people in the area, they were stopped because they were typically there to buy drugs.
So, as far as profiling, it's it's difficult to to accuse a white cop in uh in a ghetto area of of profiling when basically there's very few white people there.
You know?
In other words, the only people to pull over were black because those were the neighborhoods that you were that you were in.
There are people who will argue, however, that when they're in a predominantly white area, they do wonder why am I pulled over if they're black?
Where they are people who are where it's not the situation that you that you describe.
The and the other thing is, you know, you're taking reports all day long.
The people getting robbed, and you know, they're elderly people, they're young people, and it does have an impact on you because you became a police officer to make a difference.
So it's kind of insulting when I hear like somebody like the Blazio or something like that talking about stop questioning Fritz that it's it's discriminatory, they lose sight of the fact that these cops they do care.
And I did 30 years in the police department, and I was surrounded by a lot of cops that felt the same way.
So when you are taking these reports, it has an impact on you, and you want to look for that guy who did that robbery.
And I think that's gets lost in all this.
You know, it's there at least white and black, it's not like that.
You know, it's uh I I want to go back to you just made a very interesting comment.
You're responding to a criminal complaint, and that could be the one in Ferguson, Missouri, or could have been one of the ones that you're responding to.
You care, you're bothered that someone was victimized, and you may carry that edge into the confrontation with the s with the suspect.
On the other hand, you know you're supposed to treat that person in a certain way.
How did you how did you balance that?
As far as what?
When somebody was arrested?
No.
You're hacked off.
You're looking for a criminal, you think you found him.
He did something bad, as you say, because you care, you don't like that person.
Now he's edgy and he's twitchy, and maybe he's resisting a little bit.
The personal gut response of most of us who aren't trained police officers is I'm gonna whack the bastard because he has it coming and he's probably not going to get it in the criminal justice system.
My argument is that that is that that hardly ever happens, because if it did, we'd hear about it all the time, but we end up with L sh the L Sharpness of the world creating the impression that it does happen all the time and it's happening to innocent people.
If anything, I suspect most cops have to keep their emotions in check because the majority of the people that they are confronting are bad people who did bad things.
And and if you really want to see that person suffer, you you treat them with kick gloves and you let the justice system deal with them because the guy's gonna go away to jail.
And that's how ultimately you make a difference, you know.
And I I think cops realize that.
Uh as far as taking control of the situation, you you have to be you have to take control, or you will get hurt.
And I learned early on in my career I had my nose broken in three places during a resisting arrest situation.
And I was a young police officer.
But it taught me you have to take control of the situation from the start.
You know, once a person resists, you have to use appropriate uh physical force to restrain them and get them in the cops.
Would you would you acknowledge that there are some cops who are racist who have it in for black people?
I'm sorry.
Would you acknowledge that some I didn't say most, some cops are racist who have it in for black people?
I I guess you know, that racism is across the board in every profession, sure.
I I'm sure there are police officers like that, but I think in the police department, they uh they really they do a good job weeding that out and and looking for that, and if there are indicators of that, they work at getting rid of them.
I mean, it's there's oversight, you know, there's a civilian complaint review board, there's uh supervisors on the scene, and you know, I I think that gets lost in this.
And also the thing that happened in Staten Island, there was a black female sergeant that was present for that arrest.
Now, I didn't see her, you know, intercede.
I I didn't see any anything that indicated that it was excessive use of force in her estimation, and she's a supervisor on the scene.
I I think that gets lost in all this.
If you were if you had been at the funeral over the weekend, would you have turned your back on the mayor when he spoke?
Uh well, uh on the uh at the funeral?
Yes.
I think they were outside the funeral.
That's what I'm saying.
They were watching him on the monitor.
If you had been in the crowd that was watching on that monitor, would you have turned your back on the mayor when he spoke also?
But I I don't fault them for doing it.
I don't know that I would have done it.
I you know, i i my concern is it's a funeral in the family, but being outside, yeah, perhaps I would have.
I I can't tell you honestly.
I wasn't there.
Uh you're very honest with me.
Thanks for calling, Ryan.
Uh retired police officer calling from Queens.
We are all creatures of our own experience.
And life is nothing but context.
I think when people presume that we have a problem with a bunch of racist cops running around beating the crap out of people, we focus on something that isn't reality.
In the meantime, I just wish that there'd be one one millionth the rage directed at the teachers' unions that stop us from getting school choice in urban communities so kids can get a decent education.
The women who run around, screw every guy in sight, and raise children who never have a father.
The fathers who just decide that they have no responsibility for the children they brought into the world, the gang members who specifically recruit 12, 13, 14, 15 year old kids, because they want to put the guns in the hands of the young people because the young people don't get the terms in adult prison.
They know that the young person is only going to get a slap on the wrist the first two, three, four times, so they induce them to become gang members and violent criminals at a young age.
This is the stuff that's tearing up the black community in America.
We don't see Al Sharpton.
We don't see really anybody ever showing any anger toward them.
It's just the cops.
The problem is, and this is where I grant that you have a point is that that sounds like I'm giving a blanket pass to all cops, and I claim I'm not.
I just claim that this is a disproportionate reaction to something that I would argue isn't much of a problem and is directed primarily at people who are among the few that are actually trying to do some good.
They're not getting half million dollar government grants to run some stupid program when they take a job as a police officer, although I grant you they are well paid.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
I've got a story that I want to share, and we're going to do it in the segment after this one about the way the left now wins the arguments that they can't win if there actually was an argument, if you can follow that.
In the meantime, we've been talking about the reaction and attitude to our police officers in America, starting with what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, the reaction to the decision not to charge the New York police officers involved in the chokehold death.
We've had a case in Milwaukee that my community has been debating for some time as well.
Let's go to uh I don't know what that means.
Oh, Hudson, New Hampshire.
I didn't know if that was like Hudson on Hampton or whatever.
Hudson, New Hampshire, Bob, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Go ahead, Bob.
All right.
After we go through all of that, there is no Bob.
Uh I do want to summarize what he was going to say, though, in the little description that I got from Bo because it's a point worth making.
The police officers in New York who were outside watching the funeral service on the monitor, turned their backs rather than view the monitor when the mayor, Bill DeBlasio, was speaking.
They are being criticized for this, that this was a disrespectful protest.
The police, retired police officer who we just had on the program acknowledged that maybe he would not have done it, maybe he would have.
He's not sure.
The fact that we're debating that, though, is interesting.
That was their protest.
They turned their backs.
The Ferguson, Missouri situation became an excuse to be violent, to burn, to loot, to destroy the very neighborhoods that some of the protesters lived in.
What there's been over the last few weeks in America is some piling on by demagogues and some chiming in by people who I think couldn't care less about Michael Brown, who couldn't care less about the poor guy who was selling loose cigarettes on the streets of New York, who couldn't care less about Dante Hamilton and Milwaukee, who just want to protest.
And some of those protests became very, very violent.
And they took advantage of the situation to make everything worse.
At least the police officers who are trying to stand up for themselves and say that there is too much cop bashing going on, are doing so while exercising their rights as Americans to communicate, speak, and act out.
I don't think there's a perfect answer here.
And I think there is a situation in New York where maybe police officers do get away with it from time to time.
I'm also bothered that we would spend so much time and effort worrying about a poor guy selling loose cigarettes on the streets of New York.
But I do know this.
We have all sorts of terrible problems in urban America, and police officers are part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
I also know that the vast majority of police officers are decent people, and those that are jerks end up creating bad names for everyone else.
And all of this cop bashing, I think is excessive, overdone, unfair, and a bit immoral.
Mark Belling in for Rush.
I want to share a story from Milwaukee.
And it relates to a discussion that we had earlier in the program.
For those of you just coming in, I've been commenting on the remarkable just disappearance of American Democrats.
Nobody can name any of them, other than Obama and the congressional leadership and Hillary.
No Democratic governors left.
There's no liberal pundits that anybody listens to.
There's no liberal radio talk show host that has an audience larger than three.
This is kind of a new thing.
Democratic Party's candidates for president are Hillary, who had to marry her way into being able to be a candidate, and who's borderline elderly.
Elizabeth Warren, a 19,000-year-old socialist from Vermont, that's all they have.
Whereas the Republicans are running, a bunch of baby boomers, Generation X's, and maybe even a Y. All of the ideas and attention and thoughts and debate on issues are coming from the right.
Those of us on the right are arguing more with one another because we have actual thoughts and ideas than any kind of debate from the left.
Which leads me to this story.
What the left has done is because they have a hard time winning arguments with the American people.
We're a country that votes overwhelmingly red by geography with intense pockets of liberalism in certain areas, because they can't win any of these arguments.
They simply declare something decided.
For the longest time, they would declare it decided and mock you if you dissented.
Republicans are stupid.
W. Bush is stupid, Dan Quayle is stupid, Sarah Palin is stupid, we're all stupid.
Or you're demagogues, Rush Limbaugh's a demagogue, curvative talk show hosts are demagogues.
In other words, don't actually deal with the idea, label it as something that's stupid, label it as bigoted, as a way of just ending the debate.
American college campuses have been at the forefront of this, but they've taken it to a new level where you literally can't speak on certain issues and ideas.
There's a university in Milwaukee, Catholic University, Jesuit University called Marquette University.
This story deserves a national forum.
So I'm going to give it one.
A philosophy class.
It's being taught by a teaching assistant.
That's what happens at a lot of four-year universities.
Kids go on debt, families go into the into debt into six figures just so that they can have a teaching assistant, not even a professor teacher class.
There's a teaching assistant in a philosophy course.
Her name is Cheryl Abate.
And they were discussing something in this philosophy course.
And remember, this is a Catholic university.
Something pertaining to homosexuality.
What?
I don't know.
I wasn't there.
There are different versions.
What did happen, however, is that a student in the context of this discussion wanted to state his opposition to gay marriage.
The instructor, Cheryl Labate, said he can't because it might be hurtful to gay students who were in the class.
When he stated that it was his right to express his point of view, according to him, he claims that she alleged that he was homophobic.
In other words, in a classroom setting, in an academic university, in a philosophy course where one would think that the entire point is to debate ideas.
He was told he couldn't express his opinions on gay marriage.
You would think that would be the end of this story.
In fact, this that isn't even the story.
The story is what happened next.
The student relayed to what happened to another professor.
That professor's name is John McAdams.
John's been around a long time.
He's a rarity.
He's a conservative university professor.
He's kind of a curmudgeon.
John's been at Marquette for a long time.
He's a professor of political science and he's a blogger.
The internet came around and suddenly that silent minority, conservative professors, suddenly have a forum.
To give you an indication of where John McAdams comes from, Marquette 20 years ago dumped its university team nickname Warrior because somebody determined that it was offensive to Native Americans.
He still calls his blog, MU Warrior.
On his blog, he wrote about what happened in this philosophy course, where the instructor told the student that he couldn't express his opposition to gay marriage because this might be hurtful to students in the class who are gay.
McAdams commented on how it's another example of how universities, even in this case a Roman Catholic university, use this victim status to stifle debate.
Oh my goodness, if someone hears a point of view like this, it could be offensive, it could be hurtful to that student, and we have to protect that student from hearing something that may offend him or her that may be hurtful.
McAdams made the point, and it's a good one, that universities are places where every belief that a person has ought to be challenged.
You go there to thank, you go there to learn.
You go there to be exposed to ideas.
You go there to be able to develop your own ideas and philosophy instead.
We have made so many subjects at American universities absolutely off limits.
We establish speech codes.
You can't say this, you can't say that.
Before we discuss any number of things, professors are told to put in disclaimers that this might be offensive or upsetting to you.
What we've done is we've taken American university students, virtually all of whom are 18 or over, meaning they are adults, and we've turned them into little infants in which they have to be sheltered from ideas.
In the very place that ideas ought to be most aggressively debated, examined, and challenged.
So McAdams wrote about this.
And he said, look how far it's gone.
A student at a Catholic university can't even say aloud in class that he's opposed to gay marriage.
Banned from saying it.
That's what McAdams wrote in his blog.
For writing that, John McAdams is, as I speak to you today, not allowed to set foot on the campus of Marquette University.
The administration threw him off.
He is a tenured professor who's been there for decades.
They threw him off of campus pending an investigation.
He's still paid, but he's not allowed literally to set foot on campus.
He says he's being treated as if he were a terrorist.
I suspect that they intend to fire him.
The university sent him a letter saying that he's being investigated.
And the university president, without addressing the situation specifically, said we need to make sure that all students, and a reminder that teaching assistants are still graduate students, all students be protected from harassment and attack.
So apparently the sin that they're accusing Professor McAdams of is of daring to criticize the actions of this person who was functioning as a member of the faculty.
This is what it's come to.
Now, if you're a student and you dare express an idea that is deemed to be politically incorrect, you're told you can't talk.
And if you're a professor and you criticize that, they'll try to take your job away.
Wow.
That's a Catholic university.
This is a real wow moment.
A lot of people have spent a lot of time researching what's been happening with these campus speech codes and how universities that used to be the place where we had open inquiry and debate, where people would express every imaginable point of view.
It's why so many Marxists are on campus.
It's the place they were allowed to be open Marxists.
Now, American universities are places in which, if you dare say certain things, we'll not only hush you up, we might fire you.
The Marquette campus community is kind of debating what's happening here to Professor McAdams.
Put a lot of people on the left and a lot of his fellow faculty members, they kind of like it.
You know why they like it?
Because they figured out what to do with those pesky little conservatives who bring up conservative ideas.
We not only are going to tell you to shut up, we're gonna say you can't work here if you say these things.
The left in America is having a hard time winning arguments.
So they simply don't allow the argument to occur.
It started with the labeling of those of us who are conservatives idiots, boobs, buffoons, bigots, engagers in hate speech.
But now it's beyond that.
If you are a tenured professor with academic freedom at a Catholic university, we're gonna take your job away.
It's such a remarkable story, such a remarkable reaction.
In fact, my opinion of what happened here is that the graduate assistant, who is functioning as the faculty member here, Cheryl Abate was acting as an ideological bully.
She was using her power as professor to bully a student into not thinking what he wanted to think and not saying what he wanted to say.
Instead of standing up on behalf of the student, who was stifled and denied the right to think and speak and express himself at a university where he's paying a fortune in tuition, the university goes and tries to crack down on someone who stands up for the very openness that you think that a university like that would admire the speech codes that are in place in society,
and the labeling of all of us who dare to dissent on anything.
These are the biggest threats to free speech and free expression in our country.
As for what happened at Little Old Marquette University, which I'm proud to tell the entire country listening to the Rush program about, I actually don't think you could have gotten away with it at a much more liberal university.
University of Wisconsin, Madison, Madison's Looneyville, University of Cal Berkeley, Berkeley, California, very lefty.
At least there, in government-run institutions, there's somebody that you can gripe to, elected officials who might have some control over the university.
Here at a place like Marquette, privately run, where they literally can do what they want, as they're demonstrating, all you can do is complain about it.
You would think that maybe the religious institutions in America would be a refuge from the speech codes, the sanctioning, the stifling.
You would think that perhaps they might be a place where you're at least allowed to think in a traditional fashion, where you're allowed to hold beliefs that may actually be religiously based, but no.
Instead, there's an assault on them.
Marquette University in this instance disgraces itself.
But I suspect it's not going to be the last time it's tried.
Dare say the wrong thing on an American university campus, you're fired.
That's the way you win an argument That you couldn't win by using the powers of persuasion.
Just fire the people who say it.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
EIB, Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
Little Rock, Arkansas.
Dwight, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hey, Mark, you're doing a really good job on the show today.
I just wanted to call in and give you probably what the simplest solution really actually is to this situation.
And that we need to be honest with the cops for us.
We need to actually on our side go ahead and show at least an amount of outrage that disarns the list that shows that we really do care about the issues that they claim we don't.
That way we become an honest broker again, and we get to participate in the debate whether or not there's a lot of people.
I give you that.
I give you that.
As you know, those of us on the right are pretty sharp critics of government.
And police are part of government.
And police obviously are held to a higher standard.
An average citizen doesn't have the ability to take somebody and grab them and throw them in jail, as police officers do.
So you can't automatically give a pass to police when they do screw up.
The problem here was that this all started with the case in Ferguson, Missouri, where I think they made a very strong case that the police did not screw up.
The case that we have in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in which an individual was shot by a police officer after scuffling with him on the street.
The case was pretty compelling that the police did not screw up.
It's not like you see people on the right looking at cases of obvious blatant police brutality and giving a pass to these police officers.
I do admit the case in New York is more troublesome.
The guy was not a violent criminal for crying out loud, he was selling spare cigarettes on the street, and this, of course, is in a city in which smoking a cigarette is considered far more terrible than dealing heroin.
To put him in a chokehold over something as minor as that, I admit I have a little bit more of a problem with that.
The issue that I would take with your call, though, is that it presumes that in some of the most recent cases there was a police screw up to criticize.
Whereas in the Ferguson, Missouri case, which started all of this, I think it's pretty clear that the prosecutor, who is not a liberal, who's a Democrat from St. Louis, made very clear that that police officer acted appropriately and did not use excessive force.
Mark Belling in for Rush.
Mark Belling in for Rush.
It's been great to be back.
I've got to get out of here, though, because in two days it's New Year's Eve, and there's no place in the world I would rather not be than Times Square on New Year's Eve.
There are some things that I understand, and there are other things that I don't, and that's at the top of the list of not understanding it.
Hey, my man Aaron Rodgers, he's got to be the MVP, right?
Green Bay was going to lose that game yesterday.
Dragged himself out of the field.
When you take an otherwise average team and turn them into maybe the best team in football, that means you are the MVP.
JJ Watt, Houston Texans, would be the first defensive player in a long time to get it.
He's from a suburb of Milwaukee named Pe Waukee.
A lot of Wisconsin connections in the football.
And finally, this top of page one today's New York Times.
The military is trying to figure out why Islamic State is popular.
What's the reason for their appeal?
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