All Episodes
Previous Next
April 8, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:52
April 8, 2015, Wednesday, Hour #1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
And here we are at it again, folks.
Great to have you with us once again, Rush Limbaugh.
And EIB Network.
And the Limbo Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Let me check a switch here in a second.
Yep.
Everything's on.
Didn't sound like it was on, but it is on, so it sounds the way it's supposed to sound, at least to you.
Telephone numbers 800-282-288-2 and the email address L Rushbow at EIBNet.com.
I think everybody's got this Marie Harf thing wrong.
Have you heard about this?
Obama goes out there, and I forget where he was an interview somewhere, NPR, somewhere.
Oh, by the way, he's making a rounds on global warming.
He's blaming asthma.
Every health malady your kid has is because of climate change now.
And more scientists than ever agree that it is happening, that it is almost irreversible, and the government is the only outlet that can do anything about it to save everybody.
And he's making the rounds all over TV and the uh and the meteorology people are dutifully just sucking it all up.
We have audio sound bites to prove it.
Anyway, Obama's out there.
And he let the cat out of the bag that at the end of his that everything Netanyahu has said about the Iran deal is true.
That the Iranians are gonna get a nuke, courtesy of Barack Obama and the United States.
And Obama went out there and admitted it himself.
And that's the story about the, you know, in 10 to 13 years, they're gonna be able to nuke up.
They're gonna be able to nuke up.
Essentially, they have promised to stay one year away from weaponizing their uranium for 10 years.
So they're one year away now, five years from now, they're supposed to stay one year away.
Other words, they're not supposed to advance their capabilities beyond where they are now, not much.
And then 10, 13 years from now, they can go ahead and close the deal and get a and get a weapon.
And Obama essentially went out and said that.
So they went to the State Department.
Marie Harf, who we have referenced on this program.
I you know, it's really tough for me.
Marie Harf, you you've heard the old line.
If you want to see X in the dictionary, whatever, go look at such and such, and that's what it.
Marie Harf is that.
She she is the textbook dictionary definition of Valley Girl.
Northeastern Ivy League liberal trained governments, the end all to everything.
Feminist, I mean, she's got every everything in the ideal liberal female package, including appearance, she's it.
And she's uh she's second in command at the State Department of spokeswoman, um, Jen Pasaki was her boss.
I don't know, Pisaki's leaving and I think heading to the White House, but she may still be at the State Department.
Anyway, Marie Harf went out and said that Obama was a little mixed up there in describing what he had said about the nuclear deal.
Open confusion.
Here's the headline of the story, and they're all over the place.
Open confusion at State Department is Marie Harf tries to walk back Obama's zero breakout time admission.
Open confusion reigned today at the State Department after spokeswoman Marie Harf tried to withdraw a quote from Obama regarding Iran's nuclear breakout time.
Now let's let me check the audio sound.
I want to see if we've got her here.
If we do, I will let you hear it.
Marie Harf, Marie Harf.
I don't think Marie Harf, Marie Harf, Marie.
Nope, no Marie Harf here.
At any rate, everybody is now demanding she be fired.
Everybody's demanding that this is an act of insolence.
That this is an act of of wanton public embarrassment of Obama.
It was it was indeed in an interview with uh with NPR, Obama acknowledged that after year 13, the current deal being worked out with Iran would not provide the international community with the promised one-year warning should Iran decide to violate the deal and go.
He admitted this.
He admitted that if Iran can violate it, not to tell anybody, but not until year 13.
If anybody thinks they're gonna wait for year 13, they're crazy anyway.
But this is what Obama went out and said.
Obama said in the NPR interview, uh, well, let's see, in uh in year 13, uh 14, 15 uh of the deal.
They have advanced centrifuges that enrich uranium fairly rapidly, and at that point the breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero.
The assurances of a one-year warning time would be available to the international community for at least well over a decade.
And then in years 13 and 14, it is possible those breakout times would have been much shorter.
To translate this is exactly what I told you.
Iran is claiming promising to stay a year away from breaking out, i.e., weaponizing their nukes for the next 10 years.
When you get to your 13 or 14, uh they're gonna be much closer than a year out, and they're not gonna have to warn anybody, he can just do it.
And this is what Obama went out and said so.
And the reaction to this has been quite common-sensical.
Under the scenario that Obama just described here, there'd be no way to physically prevent them from building a nuclear weapon, and they'd be able to go nuclear at will, and Obama essentially laid out how that will happen.
In the State Department's attempted response to questions about Obama's statement, Marie Harf told reporters that the president was talking about a hypothetical scenario in which the joint comprehensive plan of action had not been enacted.
Marie Harf said that while the president's words were, quote, a little mixed up there, he was in fact, quote, referring to a scenario in which there was no deal, adding that the president's scenario was more of a hypothetical.
Well, look, without a deal, this is what could possibly happen.
He was not indicating that this is what the deal is now.
He was not indicating what would happen under an agreement in those years.
A lot of people, among them the website here, the uh Israel project outright rejected her explanation, noting that Obama was not muddled, but he was in fact responding to a question about whether the deal with Iran was worthwhile given the concessions on Iran's stockpile.
He dismissed the stockpile concern and then said the more relevant fear had to do with the sunset provisions that would allow Iran to have a zero breakout time after 13 years.
There's no room for reinterpretation here.
He said what he said, he meant to say what he said, and he said exactly what the deal is.
And he wasn't supposed to, apparently.
Or at least Marie Harf acting on her own instincts, believed that Obama had screwed up and had admitted something that nobody at the regime once admitted.
That's how I interpret this.
And so she felt it her duty to the cause, which supersedes her duty to Obama.
Remember to liberals or liberals first.
Her duty to the cause was to, at all costs make sure, try her best that people did not think Obama was actually spelling out terms of the deal.
So she says his words were a little mixed up there.
He was referring to a scenario in which there was no deal, but that's not what Obama was doing.
So now they're gonna need a new spin on Obama's comments, otherwise they're gonna be accused of blatantly trying to obfuscate with reporters and to confuse them.
And Marie Harf, I mean, there's one take out here that says that the uh, let's see, this is uh uh Charles, nope, it's Mario Loyola Mario Loyola National Review.
Says, needless to say, I'm not Obama's biggest fan, but this affront to the president's authority on the part of the State Department spokesbabe Marie Harf was shockingly incompetent.
She should be fired, along with whoever it was at the White House that she cleared her statement with.
Well, that's the key.
At ISTU is Obama's statement, an NPR interview yesterday, the effect that after the Iran nuclear deal has run its course, Iran's breakout time to nukes would be reduced to zero.
This everybody's known this.
Obama said this many, many days ago, many weeks ago.
Everybody has known.
Netanyahu was right on the money with this.
When I say everybody is known, I mean it was reported, anybody could have known.
The way this thing was originally reported was this is almost verbatim Obama.
That for 10 years, Obama uh Iran has to stay a year away.
And during the 10 years to 13 years, they are able to continue improving, researching, developing their nuclear program.
But they are promising to stay away from activating the weaponized portion for a number of years.
And then after 10 years, the original report was they have a green light.
They can go ahead and weaponize after 10 years of getting close, but but holding back.
And part of the original report was that Obama was not worried about this, because again, now this is unstated, but everybody ought to realize that Obama's worldview on this is that we don't have the right to tell them they don't get a nuclear weapon.
In fact, everybody had to realize he wants them to have a nuclear weapon.
You know, this uh little excerpt that I read from the uh the Obama interview with Thomas Loopy Friedman in the New York Times yesterday.
Let me go back to that for a second here.
Obama said we are powerful enough to be able to test these propositions without putting ourselves at risk.
And that's the thing that people don't seem to understand.
You take a country like Cuba.
For us to test the possibility that engagement leads to a better outcome for the Cuban people, there aren't that many risks for us.
It's a tiny little country.
It's not one that threatens our core security interests, so there's no reason not to test a new proposition there.
And if it turns out that it doesn't lead to better outcomes, we then adjust and change our policy again.
Here's the money portion.
He said the same thing is true with respect to Iran.
It's a larger country, dangerous country, one that's engaged in activities resulted in the death of U.S. citizens, yes.
But the truth of the matter is Iran's defense budget is 30 billion dollars.
Ours is closer to 600 billion dollars.
Iran understands they cannot fight us.
Iran's a small country, a tiny country.
Well, so's Israel.
My first reason, so's Israel.
Well, why is he so afraid of Israel?
Israel's a smaller country than Iran.
I don't know about defense budget, I don't know about GDP, but in terms of population, geographical size, Israel's much smaller.
Obama doesn't seem to say of Israel, it's a small country.
We don't have anything to worry about.
Israel's a small country.
The Middle East doesn't have anything to fear from Israel.
We can try some new forms of engagement.
If it doesn't work out, we'll try some.
Why doesn't he extend the same benefit of thought to Israel that he extends to Iran?
Bottom line is he Wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
I don't think there's any doubt about it.
And I have gone back.
I went back and I researched.
I got two things I want to share with you on this at this stage.
One a brilliant column today by a man I really admire, Norman Pedoritz at commentary.
But I went back before I get to that.
I went back to Obama's remarks at the Brandenburg Gate, June 19 of 2013.
Barack Obama, there he was, citizen of the world, standing at the Brandenburg gate in Berlin.
He wanted to do that in 2008, but they wouldn't let him.
He did a big speech in Berlin.
He wanted to go to the Brandenburg Gate, they wouldn't let him because he wasn't anything at that point.
So he made sure to go back to the Brandenburg gate when he was somebody.
And he said in 2013 in June, it's June 19th, actually.
We reject the nuclear weaponization in North Korea and Iran may be seeking.
That's a quote.
We reject the nuclear weaponization that North Korea and Iran may be seeking.
This is in 13, which means it's pre-election, which means Obama is guaranteed to be prevaricating.
So I guess today be safe to say that Obama rejects his rejection.
In 2013, Obama said he was working to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, cited North Korea, cited Iran.
Today, Obama is working, if not to guarantee the spread of nuclear weapons, he certainly isn't working to stop it in Iran.
In context, this is kind of blockbuster to me.
And Netanyahu spoke to Congress in support of Obama's declarations in 2013.
So it's Obama who's flipped.
Oh, there's a picture of Ted Cruz up.
Did you see Ted Cruz announced 31 million dollars raised by his PAC the day after Rand Paul announced?
Oh it is stunning.
Did you see?
We've got the audio sound.
Did you see that Rand Paul went on today's show with Savannah Guthrie?
You liked it?
Yeah, yeah.
Snerdley thinks he schooled her.
Maybe.
But I get to c a classic example of why go there.
She showed open disrespect.
She had no interest whatsoever in the substance of what he was saying and tried to prevent him from announcing or saying of contributing any substance.
She's the one that scores, Savannah Guthrie.
I got a Rand Paul interview.
Rand Paul, what's his scene arguing with an with a reporter, not being treated with respect, not being treated as she treats everybody else as though we're buds and friends.
He's treated as an oddball, practically an alien.
Why do this?
I don't think we've learned that there's nothing to gain.
I know the old line of thought is when you've got to go to the Lions Den.
Yeah, the game is the game.
There's the clock again, folks.
I'm sorry, but I'm another way of putting this, folks.
For 10 years, Iran can build up its enriched uranium supply to the brink of it being almost usable for nuclear weapons.
It currently has enough enriched uranium for seven bombs.
And then after ten years, who knows how many bombs they'll be able to make.
The Iranians currently enriched uranium only needs to be boosted from 20% to 80% to be used as nuclear material, and they now have new centrifuges, which can do that very quickly because the sanctions have been lifted, and they can get even more centrifuges.
They're not going to have to get rid of the centrifuges that they got, the new ones.
They get to keep them.
Now here's Marie Harf.
This was at the State Department yesterday.
And a AP reporter, Matt Lee said, I'd like to go to Iran and the president's rather unusual sales job in this most recent interview, which he said after 13 years that Iran would have the capability or could have to produce a nuclear weapon.
I think his words were a little mixed up there, but what he was referring to is a scenario in which they there was no deal.
And if you go back and look at the transcript, I know it's a little confusing.
I spoke to the folks at the White House and read it a few times.
It's my understanding that he was referring to, even though it was a little muddled in the words, to a scenario in which there was no deal.
Now, how does that make Obama look?
It means means this woman had to get together with people to the White House and ask them, what did he just say?
Oh my God, did he just tell the truth about oh my God, what are we gonna do?
And they sent Harf out there on that was a damage control.
Well, it was a little mixed up of his words out there.
Even though make up in the ring out there, you know, he would I technically people don't white house, and he was he was thinking when there's no deal, everybody knew that.
Look at the conca.
Look, folks, the bottom line is this with the billions of dollars that are coming in from the end of sanctions on Iran, they're gonna be able to build a lot of new centrifuges or import them.
And that's gonna speed up the enrichment to nuclear-grade uranium pretty damn quick.
Now, we had a caller yesterday who suggested that a lot of people are missing the point that they're not just trying to build a bomb.
They have seven now.
They're on the way to having seven.
But that's not what they're doing.
They're choosing to put off building individual bombs so that they can develop a nuclear arsenal, an entire nuclear program.
Right now, we could probably take out one of their two or even seven of their bombs, but ten years from now, they're gonna have hundreds of them, which we won't be able to take out with bombs.
And that I know it sounds, well, then what are we doing here?
Exactly.
It's exactly right.
Now, Marie Harf, if Obama was talking about the situation with no deal, and he clearly was not doing that, he let the cat out of the bag, and they were in panic at the State Department.
Because on one hand, you've got John Kerry over there out there actually campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize.
And despite the fact that nobody believes it, the regime position is that they have put Iran on hold.
That Obama's the first guy to come along to tackle this.
And because of the power of Obama's personality, his charisma, his speeches, whatever, the Iranians have agreed to suspend the development of their weapons program.
That's what the State Department position is.
They're out there telling all these lies or prevarications, falsehoods about the deal.
Then Obama goes out there in an interview with NPR lets a cat out of the bag, first about 10 years, then 13 years, and then this one-year period that they're supposed to stay away.
If Obama was talking about this in a hypothetical, which he wasn't, clearly, but if he was, let's just play the game.
If he was talking about this in the hypothetical that there's no deal, well then all he had to say was that Iran could get a bomb within two months.
Because that's what everybody says.
I mean, the intelligence people and everybody that's been studying this, any length of Times says they're that close, just a couple of months away.
The question is, does Iran want just one or two bombs now, which could be taken out by Israel or by us, or do they want protection from Israel for 10 years while they build up a large enough stockpile that could never completely be taken out?
That's the game here.
It's not a game, but that's that's that's the Iranian agenda.
And that's why they eagerly agree to this supposed 10-year moratorium with the promise that they will stay a year away from fully weaponizing all of their uranium.
During those ten years, they continue to build up an entire nuclear program, which after 10, 13 years would permit them to essentially weaponize a bunch of bombs.
And during the 10 years, nobody's gonna touch them because they've agreed not to do anything for 10 years or 13.
So there's no attack on them.
And the sanctions have been listed, lifted.
So Iran tells everybody they're going to agree to this deal, whatever it is.
Sanctions are lifted.
Nobody can touch them for 10 years because they're theoretically not doing anything for 10 years.
But then we get to years 1213, and all of a sudden Obama lets the cat out of the bag that at that point they can weaponize and we wouldn't even know it.
So the danger is that 10 years from now, even sooner, the Iranians could have hundreds of bombs, which nobody would be able to take out.
That is what I believe.
This is an estimate, but I think it's pretty close.
I think what happened here is that Obama lets that cat out of the bag, and Marie Harf panics.
This administration is not about openness and transparent, despite what they say.
So they had to go into immediate spin mode, or CYA.
So she admitted she called somebody over at the White House.
What the heck's he doing?
So they had to say he went out and got his words mixed up.
I can you imagine?
Can you imagine uh Madame Albright when she was Secretary of State during the Kosovo war, conducting a press conference, answering question from the AP about something that uh slick Willie's out there doing.
Well, you know, he spoke uh out of turn.
He really didn't words were kind of mixed up and muddled there.
And I have to kind of straighten this out for you.
Can you imagine?
Or if George Schultz had done something similar to Ronaldus Magnus or Jim Baker, whoever.
I mean, this is fascinating to me.
Because Obama lets the cat out of the bag, Marie Harf panics, because the truth is not what they're about, and they have to try to convince everybody.
No, no, no.
Well, you you didn't hear what he said, and even if you did, he didn't mean it, because he was talking about a hypothetical.
Now, from the times of Israel uh today, Israel rejects U.S. attempt to reinterpret Obama's warning of the deal's flaws.
Now there are people, I may be in a minority here.
There are people who believe that Marie Harf made a fool of herself yesterday again.
So I'm cutting her some slack.
I'm thinking she's trying to save the cause, even if she appeared to be dumping on Obama.
But there are a lot of people that think that's wrong.
No, they think that she just made a fool of herself, that she's too big for her britches, that she's not nearly as important as she exists in her own mind, and that and that she takes it upon herself to know more than Obama does, and to speak more openly about it than Obama did.
That's what the popular perception of Marie Harf is among some people.
That she's just so full of herself that she thinks Obama doesn't know what he's talking about, but she does.
And so she's gonna take it on herself to go out and tell the world that the president essentially didn't know what he was talking about, but I'm here to tell you what the truth is.
And in that sense, in that view, you'd say she made a fool of herself when she claimed Obama was mixed up in his comments about the breakout time.
But he wasn't, is the bottom line.
But another interesting thing about this, in his remarks to NPR, Obama admitted exactly what Benjamin Netanyahu has been saying.
Quote, the official noted furthermore that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had highlighted precisely the problem Obama cited when he addressed both houses of Congress last month.
And quote, that is Obama has admitted that when the deal expires, Iran will have the bomb.
In fact, a lot of, and this is not open to interpretation.
This has been stated.
This was some of this is a little curious To me, only because I'm asked, what's the big deal?
He's already admitted this.
Was it last week or the week before?
I remember being incredulous that he made this admission, coming to the golden EIB microphone and talking about it.
In the original version of this, Obama said, yeah, they're going to hold off for ten years, and ten years they're going to get it, but in that time we're going to be using the powers of our persuasion to convince them they should never use the bomb.
But it's not up to us to deny them.
We don't have that right.
We don't have authority.
Who are we to tell them they can't have a bomb?
Now he didn't say that, but that's what he believes.
It is abundantly clear.
And I cited uh Norman Pedoritz.
I feel really fortunate to have gotten into Norman Pedoritz.
Norman Pedoritz, I put in the area of foreign policy and general overall intellect.
I put him in the same classroom that you would find William Buckley and Milton Friedman and some of the founders.
And I've uh I've been fortunate to meet Mr. Bedorts.
One of the last times I was with Bill Buckley was uh out at the Buckley home in Stanford, Connecticut, and uh Pedoritz and his wife Midge Dector were there.
And Buckley had just gotten out of the hospital.
Uh it was a scare, it was emphysema.
And he was he was just getting back into form, wasn't quite there, but it was in it was just a great, great Saturday afternoon, uh, talking about things.
We've interviewed him for the Limbaughter.
He's got a piece, commentary, which I think is a website that he started, and it's entitled Obama's Right.
He said, whenever Barack Obama says, as he often does, that another war in the Middle East is the only alternative to the deal he's making with Iran, his critics immediately accuse him of setting up straw man, which he does a lot.
Even Netanyahu declares that the true alternative to the deal is not war, but a better deal.
And so do leading domestic opponents like Senators Lindsay Gramnesty and Tom Cotton.
Now, I consider the writing, now I consider the agreement Obama has negotiated a dishonorable and dangerous product of appeasement.
So it pains me to side with him against political figures I admire and generally support.
But nevertheless, I have to confess that I think he's right in arguing the only alternative to a deal is war.
Now, where he's going with this, not exactly, you know, my my uh often and long expressed what I think is common sense, the Middle East peace process, which is now its own entity.
It's something that you can aspire to as a career to be and to work at the Middle East peace process, meaning you could have a lifetime career there.
It never ends.
The Middle East peace process.
The only thing that changes there are the people, as they die off and are replaced by younger graduates of Ivy League schools who are trained in sustaining the Middle East peace process.
Because the one noteworthy thing about the Middle East peace process is A, there's never any peace, and B, it never ends.
It's an ideal existence for an eggheaded bureaucrat, whose primary objective in life is to make sure his bureaucracy never closes.
Ergo, the Middle East peace process itself will never deliver Middle East peace.
And to that end, I have, I think, with just some common sense, have offered up an opinion that in conflicts like these, they never end with negotiations.
They ever end with agreed to words, and well, they do, but they're not solved with words.
They're not solved with speeches.
They're not solved with agreements, they're not solved with negotiations or any of that.
They're solved militarily.
Germany surrendered, Japan surrendered after suffering humiliating military defeats, which were so complete they were unable to even continue to defend themselves.
And that's when the words and the negotiations really started to matter.
Those are the terms of surrender.
That's when the signatures take place.
But in any conflict like this, it's never going to end until one side defeats the other, and you don't defeat anybody with words and doctors and nurses and clean water and the Red Cross and the United Nations and the blue helmeted peacekeepers and whatever the hell else that's part of your process.
Now, Pedoritz is not per se saying that.
What he says is I do not mean that war is the only alternative to Obama's deal alone.
What I mean is that war is the only alternative to any deal the Iranians would be willing to sign.
If that is, the purpose is really to prevent them from getting the bomb.
Obama keeps insisting that this is what his deal will accomplish.
But it seems increasingly clear that he no longer thinks that, if he ever did, that an Iran armed with nuclear weapons would be so dangerous that it must be prevented at all costs from getting them.
He he's he used to say that he believed that.
And as recently as June 13, uh June 2013 at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.
But he doesn't believe that anymore.
He doesn't believe that an Iran armed with nuclear weapons would be so dangerous that they should be prevented from getting them.
Ergo, the only real solution here, Pedor war.
And he's right.
Nobody wants to hear it, nobody wants to contemplate it, nobody wants to consider it, but it's what it is.
Anyway, folks, Norman Padoritz is right.
Economic sanctions did not stop Iran from pursuing the mom.
Economic sanctions stop them because, well, the Russians didn't didn't uh didn't didn't obey them or or participate in them.
The Iranians, I mean, they they hurt.
I mean, there's no question the sanctions harmed Iran's economy, but since Iran doesn't really care about its people the way an American president cares about his people or any Western democracy leader cares about his people, um, that wasn't a big deal.
The bottom line is sanctions did not stop them, and that's a form of coercion.
Uh mild warfare, economic warfare didn't stop them.
The only thing that will stop them is having their stocks taken out, and that's the only reason they're pretending to go along with this deal, because the deal will protect them from being bombed or attacked for the next ten years while they continue to build up their stocks.
Here's Greg in uh in Lul as we head to the phones, and I'm glad you called, sir.
Great to have you here.
Hi, Russ, how are you today?
Very well, thank you.
Always enjoy talking to you.
Thank you.
Um, I have to disagree with you.
I I think the problem that the neocons have and the people like Pedoritz, who speak for the neocons, is basically what they want.
You know, we don't want we don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
But how far are you willing to go to stop it?
Are you willing to start a war with Iran?
Which apparently is what Lindsay Graham and Norman Podoritz and people like that want to do.
And I think that's an unwise and undesirable thing to do.
Um so that that's where we are.
Well, then where we are is the Iranians get their desired nukes and their desired program.
And then the Soviet Union fell without a war.
The Soviet Union uh collapsed without uh the the military confrontations because we outcompeted them economically, we outproduced them and the government collapsed.
Well, but that's to be a war.
That's that's not really the sole reason.
It wasn't as if you beat them economically, that happened every year.
Right.
They were defeated militarily.
Nothing.
The shot wasn't fired, but they were defeated militarily.
Well, let's defeat around the same way.
Um but the Iranian the Soviet Union was never led by religious fanatics who thought the apocalypse was their salvation.
Soviet Union was led by a bunch of Marxists that didn't believe in religion.
They were gods.
It's it's a dangerous comparison, I think.
Now, Pedoretz, I don't I don't know anybody's advocating war.
I don't read that in his piece.
He's just saying if you're really serious about stopping them, this is what it's gonna take.
And you can threaten it, you can do all kinds of things, none of which we're doing.
The point is we're bending over the bottom line.
Anyway, I appreciate the call.
Greg, we have to go.
Be right back.
I think what Obama is relying on here is that his belief is nobody cares.
The low information crowd doesn't care whether Iran gets a nuke.
Nobody thinks Iran would ever use one.
Nobody thinks anybody's gonna ever use one.
So it's no big deal.
▲
Export Selection