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June 10, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:09
June 10, 2015, Wednesday, Hour #3
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Bucks Exon here in for Rush Limbaugh, thank you for staying with me.
Thank you for joining.
Also, you can send me your thoughts at Bucks Exon on Twitter if you tweet, if you're more of a Facebook guy or a gal, you can go to Facebook.com slash Buck Sexton, talk to me there.
I'm trying to respond as fast as I can throughout the show, and we'll continue after the show today.
Eric Erickson in tomorrow and Roger Hedgecock in on Friday.
Let's talk about cops, shall we?
Let's talk about what happens when police are treated like the enemy.
Now there are a couple of stories that are catching a fair amount of attention right now, catching uh that are big headlines that I think are worth our time.
On the on the one hand, of course, you have this officer in McKinney near Dallas, uh, Officer Eric uh David Eric Casebolt, who has resigned as of yesterday from the McKinney Police Department.
Now, this, of course, comes after that that video that went viral of the pool party, pool party that was rowdy, that residents there called police on, and that there were reports that there were fights and uh it was just getting out of control.
So the police came into a crowd control situation, and this officer uh was caught on video for a number of minutes.
I think I saw a six or seven minute long full video of this, although most of the focus comes uh later on in that.
He's trying to clear out the area, arresting some people for running, they say there's a fight.
It's a difficult situation for the cops to deal with.
They don't know how old these individuals are that they're having to to uh to handle and to try to get a uh a hold of the whole situation.
And he this one officer on video reacts in a way that would seem to be heated, overheated given the circumstances, and was overly physical and rough with a young lady.
There were also some who said, well, he pulled out his gun as well, and that was initially the complaint, you see, because the first instinct is to complain about the cops in these situations.
And the first instinct was to say, well, he pulled out his firearm, therefore that's a huge overreaction.
But when you look at the video, he's trying to handle one I guess at this point he wouldn't say necessarily a suspect, but one individual and two others come up alongside him very quickly and look as though they're about to try to intervene and perhaps put their hands on the officer.
That is a situation where as a cop, if you he didn't point his weapon at anyone, he drew his weapon, he might have been able to articulate, or he could articulate now that he's in fear for his safety at that point.
If he's in fear for his safety, he's allowed to pull his weapon.
The problem comes with his treatment of the young uh the young woman, and which was all caught on video and did seem uh rough and excessive to many who watched it.
I thought, and I am somebody who worked for the NYPD, I have law enforcement in my family, he did not handle this well, he did not handle this appropriately.
Now keep this in context.
The young woman was not injured.
Nobody was injured, thank heavens, uh police or civilians.
Nobody was hurt in this in this incident, but it plays into a broader narrative, and this is yet another instance.
Well, you'll see people going on television, there'll be a lot of left-wing pundits and writers and all these sites when they take a moment to sort of stop just uh joyriding in the wreckage of other people's lives, you know, with the gossip and all the sort of uh sewer spewing that they do.
Uh they'll take a break from that to talk about how yet again we see how racist cops are and how bad cops are, and this just proves all of that to them.
So that's one narrative, right?
And this officer has now resigned.
They're telling us that the chief of police for McKinney is saying that he wasn't pressured to resign.
I find that very hard to believe.
And whether you pressure somebody or not officially, if the department isn't going to stand behind him in any way, of course he's gonna feel like he's out there on his own and he's probably gonna resign.
Uh that's the sort of thing that I guess we should expect now.
Um we should expect there to be changes.
Not saying it makes it right, I'm just saying we should expect there to be changes in how police departments view at the at the top level how the brass treats the patrolman.
So this is one aspect of the narrative, and this is playing out now, and of course you're gonna hear a lot of how America is or American police rather are so racist and it's a systematic racism that you might not even be aware of and all the rest of it.
So that's going on.
On the other side of this, you have today, I see this at CNN.com, um, a recognition of the fact that there are spikes in violence occurring across the country, not just in Baltimore, though Baltimore is one of the best examples of this, and some are being forced to answer the question why is this happening?
Follow on question.
Could it be because of the narrative that has been emerging over really the last year or so about cops pushed relentlessly in the media?
That in a country where we have hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers of one kind or another, any one incident is indicative of all incidents, that there can't be a few bad cops and lots and lots of good cops doing fantastic work to save or to uh safeguard rather their communities, in some cases save them if they're really in rough shape.
That can't be the way we view this.
We have to see this as systemic, it's widespread.
It's interesting to me because narrative is what they say motivates the police, narratives about primarily minority men, that motivates the police to act in a certain way, and the police respond to young minority men in a more aggressive fashion, are more likely to draw their weapons or to injure young minority men because of narrative.
But then when you say, well, what about this anti-cop narrative?
Could this be pushing police to change their tactics, to change the way that they're doing their jobs in communities across the country?
They say, oh no, that's this is ridiculous.
That's that's not what's happening here.
There's something else, and there's this frenzied effort underway right now to try to find some other justification or rather some other rationalization about why police aren't able to do their jobs as effectively in some communities.
The crime wave that we've been worried about for months seems to be upon us and is likely only to get worse, particularly in urban areas in the summer.
That's when you have traditionally spikes in violence.
You have a uh gun violence up 60% in Baltimore, murders up 180% in Milwaukee, shootings jumping almost 40% in St. Louis, and if you look at New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, and many other cities, they are also suffering from increases in primarily violent crime.
These are statistics.
I think Heather McDonald wrote this in the Wall Street Journal, has been on this and continuing to push the facts about this, because you can't have a real discussion about police tactics and police brutality or the hyperventilating about a few instances, depending on which side of this you stand on, without knowing what the facts actually are.
So, yes, is it surprising at all?
Is it surprising that cops are going to change their behavior and that that will have very serious consequences?
Of course not, because we know that narrative matters.
They tell us constantly, in fact, at the heart of the whole anti-cop movement over the last year, the idea of police as an occupying force has received traction in some corners of the media.
The idea of the police, even minority police officers, as inherently tainted by racist uh inclinations or ideology or whatever.
That narrative, they say, is the reason for police brutality and some of the shootings and some of the interactions that we've seen.
And then we say, okay, well, even if we assume that that's true, and that's not an assumption that I'm willing to grant, but just for the purposes of our discussion, even if we assume that that's true, what about the narrative that now cops are changing their behavior because they don't want to get caught up in one of these absolutely uh frenzied cases where because some video or some photo or some eyewitnesses uh decide that they're going to say that a cop was acting in a violent or disorderly fashion,
that their career is over, they're gonna have to live in seclusion to hide from all the death threats.
Who wants that on their head?
These cops, these law enforcement officers, they have families.
They're doing a tough job day in and day out.
They have to get in the middle of domestic disputes and hope that nobody sticks a rusty screwdriver in their shoulder.
They have to pull somebody over and hope that when they go up to the window, no one pulls a weapon on them because it's actually a fling felon they've stumbled upon.
They have to deal with that day in and day out already.
And now they also have to deal with the reality of what happens when you try to use force, because remember, law is not law if there's not force backing it.
Right?
And you can figure this out, just keep refusing to pay your tax bill, eventually someone's gonna show up with a gun and say you're coming with me.
And that's for nonviolent crimes.
It doesn't matter.
Eventually, men with gun will be sent by the state to force you to do something.
That is the basis of all of this.
And you should remember that when we're talking about all the laws and all the crazy laws that Congress is passing all the time and all the regulations.
But I digress.
Now we have police officers that Have to worry about not just their career being over, but also the possibility that their life will be in jeopardy, their lives will be threatened, their children's lives, their wives' lives, or their husbands' lives will be threatened because of an incident that, as we know in some cases, case in point here would be Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, was completely mischaracterized by some eyewitnesses and by the press at large.
They made us all believe that that was a, or they believed at least, and tried to make us believe that that was a cold-blooded execution.
When even Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department said that that was a lie.
That was not true, that's not what happened.
But those lies add up over time.
And being right some of the time when they have this anti-cop narrative does not justify the times that they are wrong.
We're looking now for why is it?
How is it that we could see in this day and age, given the increased uh law enforcement ability to do surveillance and the uh sort of technical and digital advances of law enforcement across the country?
How is it that we could see spikes in crime in so many urban centers?
Why are we seeing this happen, particularly in Baltimore?
Well, as I said, on CNN.com, they interview a number of individual police officers who just say, look, now it's a question of do I do I want to take that radio call?
Do I want to run down that alleyway and see what's awaiting me on the other side, or do I just, you know, I let it go.
There is a risk factor that has been increased for cops now because they know that they can't count on the authorities necessarily to protect them if the political narrative goes against them.
And you can tell me that this is great because, oh, we need to have cops that are on notice now.
They can't abuse people.
They can't be abusive.
They can't look, I worked for a police department.
Let me tell you, if someone levels a sexual harassment complaint against a cop, they're going to spend countless hours in some d detention room where they're answering all these questions and such.
I mean, there's internal affairs bureaus in all the major police departments in the country.
They have near limitless powers to question and and and harass their own officers.
And people are telling me all the time that there's no look, there's a balancing act that has to occur here, right?
Everyone's against police brutality.
Everybody thinks that citizens should have their rights respected at all times.
But when you change the narrative in this way, and police officers are telling us, they are telling us that they're changing their behavior, it means that innocent people are actually getting hurt.
More people are dying.
Let me put this in plain language.
More people are dying in U.S. cities now because of the narrative of police brutality over the last 12 months.
That's just the statistics.
That's just the fact.
Unless somebody can come up with another plausible reason why we've seen dramatic spikes, 180% in Milwaukee.
I mean, why we've seen dramatic spikes, not just in one place, not just in Baltimore or Ferguson, but across the country.
I want a plausible narrative other than the cops are changing their behavior.
They're not going to take, they're not going to say they're going that extra mile makes it sound like they're in, you know, a an Eagle Scout or something, but they're not going to put themselves in harm's way unless they absolutely have to.
And harm's way can mean just having to wrestle somebody to the ground now.
Because let me tell you, when cops have to wrestle someone to the ground, if they don't want to go, it's always ugly.
There's no fun, there's no easy way to do this.
No.
She should have I I already said the girl and the young lady of the bikini, he was out of line, and he should have resigned.
But the problem nationally, the problem, and and the it was interesting, though, you'll notice people watch that video.
They first wanted to go after the gun issue.
At first it was pulling the gun, and then they said, okay, well, hold on, you can't have people that are trying to rush you and you're a cop, you can't see.
But then when you look at the video of the young girl, uh look, I I, like I said, law enforcement I family, I've worked, worked with law enforcement.
He needs to be told the barrel roll was weird.
I don't know where that came from.
That was sort of like lethal weapon back in the 80s when, you know, he used to do the you know what I mean?
He used to do the always Mel Gibson used to sort of get out in the middle of the street and just sort of barrel roll with a beretta in each hand.
I've never seen anything like that.
My understanding is, and I'm not an operator by any means, my understanding is tactically that's not going to work.
But look, this off the officer was the officer, in my opinion, based on the video, I know it's difficult circumstances.
He's out of line, he shouldn't have done that.
And if they want to terminate him, look, nobody was hurt, right?
So nobody, I mean, criminal charges to me would be too far, but if they're going to terminate him, that's the police department's decision.
He's already resigned.
But while that's happening, I just think we have to keep in mind that the broader narrative that is tainting police across the country is changing their behavior and attitudes in ways that primarily mean that individuals will be hurt in minority communities where you have concentrations of crime in urban centers as well as across I mean this is across all spectrums across the country, but still that's what I think's happening.
You can tell me if I'm wrong.
800-282-2882.
If we got some law enforcement or some others out there who want to weigh in on this, I would love to hear from you.
This is Buck Sexton Inforrush Limbaugh.
I'll be back in just a minute.
Buck Sexton here in for rush limbaugh.
We're talking about cops, the anti-cop narrative, how to make these communities safe without people feeling like the cops are being uh prejudiced or rough with them, and this is an ongoing, ongoing debate, getting a lot of heat these days because of these continuous incidents, whether it's in Ferguson or it's in Baltimore.
I will say that I find it highly suspicious that the prosecutor in the case in Baltimore, uh Mosby, who apparently filed uh a request, or rather filed an order with the judge not to allow the autopsy to be released in the wrong court.
I believe that's been now uh they've they've changed that.
But I find it highly suspicious that she wants to do that in the first place, given how politicized her tone has been up to this point.
Why can't we know what's in the autopsy report?
That's a scientific document, right?
We should be able to know, I would think.
Um but there's obviously a lot of politics surrounding all of this now.
You have the uh commissioner of the NYPD, Commissioner Bratton, this just was to uh this was just from uh from yesterday, I believe, saying that when he's asked why there aren't more uh minority police officers, he says it's because of the level of minority arrests as a percentage, and then he immediately says, Well, and it's also because of Stopin Frisk.
Because he knows that he's going into some very he's going to some very difficult territory there, and he's got a rough situation on his hands with a a crime rate that's getting higher and higher in New York City after having fallen off a cliff, thankfully, means a lot of people are alive today, probably wouldn't have been otherwise.
But these issues are hypersensitive.
Let's take some calls.
We have Steve in Oregon here.
Steve, you're on the Rush Limbaugh show.
You're speaking to Buck Sexton.
Hi, Buck.
Uh great program today.
Uh, you make a good uh guest host.
Thank you.
I'm uh I uh long time listener since like August of eighty-eight, so I listened to a lot of a lot of good shows.
This uh you're qualified to approve of my guest hosting.
I appreciate that.
That's good.
That's a long time listener.
He has a good uh that's part of his excellence thing, see.
So I get I'm watching this stuff on the news, I'm clear out here in Oregon, you know, but we have our problems here and bigger some of the bigger cities, but it just seems to me that that the main uh the lame stream media constantly goes for the negative side of it, and they're always um portraying the the cops.
Nobody ever talks about the fact that some of these people are committing crimes.
And and that's what it's always on the what the cops are doing to them.
Well, the police wouldn't be there if there wasn't some reason to be there.
Uh and they never get they never talk about it.
Well, you know, I think one thing that isn't that isn't talked about enough, Steve, is that the primary uh the primary victims or the disproportionate victims of crime in uh in many of these communities we're talking about are minorities, and you you'll have countless examples of people who will say that look, when you meet with the community leaders in these places, they're saying, look, we want better policing.
We want we we appreciate the cops on the street.
We want to be safe when we go to work, we want our kids safe when they go to school, and that's the that's actually their reality.
The dominant narrative is that they want safer streets, and that and that this is generally the case.
It's when you get into a media narrative and you get a lot of these people, and some of them are columnists for the New York Times and are going on different cable outlets who want to be the sort of heroes of the movement who are constantly demonizing the police, and they live in the safest neighborhoods imaginable.
And I just think that there's a hypocrisy with that that's really unseemly and gross.
And I think that this is something that people should spend more time thinking about, which is what are what are the police really trying to do day in and day out.
They're supp they're trying to, uh, in a vast majority of cases, and and there's agreement on this, right?
Everyone agrees in the vast majority of cases, or shouldn't say everyone, but it seems to be a narrative on both the left and the right that there's uh the cops are trying to do their best and that they're doing what they can, and that there are some bad apples, just like there.
I've said this before, there are bad doctors, there are bad lawyers, there are bad soldiers, there's bad everything that exists in the world, but we don't condemn everyone because the actions of a bad few.
And I think that that narrative has just gotten out of control these days.
So uh thank you for calling in.
Uh let's oh, I wanted to take that call.
We'll have to wait on that call.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We got a we got a a retired NYPD officer.
That'll be fun.
Buck Sexton in for Rush Limbaugh, 800 282 2882.
Back in a minute.
Buck Sexton here in for Rush Limbaugh.
More on me at the Blaze.com slash Buck Sexton.
I'm of course of the Blaze, also a CNN contributor, formerly of the CIA as an analyst and the NYPD as an intelligence division specialist.
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Let's take Hank in Orlando.
Hank, you're on the Rush Limbaugh Show, you're speaking to Buck Sexton.
Hiya, Buck.
How are you doing, sir?
Uh I'm doing good.
I'm a retired New York City police officer.
I did twenty years on the street in Brooklyn North.
And uh that thing that I saw the other day with that pool, that cop was a hundred percent justified in everything he did.
Basically in the beginning, he was there by himself.
And I was taught through the academy, any time that we come onto the scene, we take over.
Those people must listen to everything we say.
And once it gets out of hand and unruly like that, the cop did the right thing with his gun, he didn't know what they were going to do to him.
And we're out there to protect the people and go home safe that night.
I'm with you on the gun.
I watched that video on the the drawing of the gun, he put it right back afterwards, but I I can understand why he would have been concerned there, and I know cops have actually pulled their guns for much less in traffic stop situations than else and uh and other situations.
But with the young girl, it seemed I mean, did he really have to he sort of was saying, you know, on face down on the ground, and and it seemed like he was being more rough with her than he had to be under the circumstances to me.
I mean, this is a young girl, she's fourteen, he obviously he was on the ground, he wants her to be face first on the ground.
I mean, Hank, that doesn't that that didn't seem a little a little excessive to you?
No, because she did not comply.
We're not there to play games with these people.
When they tell them to do something, they have to comply.
That is the law too.
That's called resisting arrest.
So what happens with the McKinney, uh the McKinney police chief there?
Why do you think he it seems like he threw this officer under the bus pretty quickly?
W why is it?
You think that's just the politics, or you think that he It's of course it's a politics.
They're gonna do anything possible to keep their name, their city, their position out of the news.
These poor cops that are out there today, like if I was in New York today, it wouldn't be the New York City police department, it's the Hank Police Department because whatever I do from second to second, they'll call me on, and they have a week to do it, a month to do it.
They're not out there in the street with us.
And things happen instantaneously, and we have to make snap judgments, and right or wrong, we have to do it.
That's why that job is so tough.
It's not an easy job, and the cops that I work with, I would love to have those cops patrolling my neighborhood because they took nothing off of nobody, and what they would do is stop the crime, slow it down.
Now I feel peop I feel very sorry for the people of New York and all these major cities because they don't know it, but they don't have police departments anymore.
These guys are gonna back off.
Yeah, well, there is backing off happening.
But I I gotta tell you, Hank, you know, if I'm I'm with you on the um and I you might have caught this as I was doing the show before.
I mean, I I worked for the NYPD for a little while, though, in a counterterrorism role, so not in a street patrol uh patrolling role, which I want to be very clear about, but I have some familiarity with uh you know with the the patrol guide and and police procedure, and I'm with you on the on the the drawing of the weapon never bothered me because of it looked very clear to me, you know, one of those individuals, he can't see them, they're coming out of his peripheral vision, and they're moving in fast, they shouldn't have been that was you know, obstructing essentially, or about to be obstructing.
That wasn't a problem for me, but I just think if that was my sister, she's fourteen, I think that the cop could have taken a different approach to it.
That's that's how I that's how I see it.
But Hank, I I respect you calling in and uh and I think that uh you know it's good to hear from some law enforcement on the issue.
Now let's take Ron in uh Connecticut.
Ron, you're on the Rush Limbaugh show, you're speaking to Buck Sexton.
Yeah, I want to thank you very much for taking my call.
You know, I see this uh this has been a lot of frustration built up for over the years, and it's not just against the police, it's against the entire court system.
You know and I know.
If you have a lot of money, and you're gonna go out there and get a real hot shot lawyer with a big reputation, you're gonna go and get him or her, and you're gonna get off, or you're gonna get a very lenient sentence.
Where somebody like you or me that don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars for a hot shot lawyer, we're gonna get a sentence of probably twenty or thirty years.
And it's just too much injustice.
If you're a politician, we've had them.
You get a levient sentence.
A good lawyer would get you off with almost a slap on the hands.
So the laws don't pertain to everyday work in person.
Look at that.
We've had it right here in Connecticut.
You had a killing right in Cheshire, Connecticut.
Dr. Pennett's wife and two daughters.
They want to retry all these cases over again.
And they caught these guys coming out of the house.
So, you know, where's the reality here?
It's okay to defend somebody who's who's possibly innocent, but when you know they're guilty, without a doubt, they deserve no representation.
I'm sorry.
Well, I think that they have to have representation, but I I I agree with you that there's a disparity um with, for example, having a public defender versus being able to pay for a hot shot legal team.
I I think this became very clear to a lot of Americans if they didn't already know this during the uh HBO documentary, The Jinx, when that guy Robert Durst was, you know, uh he said, you know, goodbye, 250,000 dollars, you know, I'm gone.
I mean, he had this whole thing where he had paid very he paid his bail in cash and he had a uh 1.8 million dollars I think he spent on lawyers, and he got away with cutting off his next door neighbor's uh head and trying to stash the body.
Uh it's it's amazing what you can get away with if you have the money uh for the legal team, and there's other cases that we could cite.
We could sit here all day and do that.
But you do have due process rights for the accused, and I do think we have to provide them with representation.
In the case of the uh that that Connecticut uh case that you bring up, by the way.
I mean, that's for people like me who who have uh who get uncomfortable sometimes with with the notion of the death penalty, that's one of the cases you point out and say, okay, I'm actually not uncomfortable with the death penalty anymore.
So I think that that's uh for what it's worth, I believe that that case has has raised for a lot of people that that's a particular instance of where you think that the death penalty is would be well applied and and makes sense and and is just.
Uh but Ron, thank you for calling in.
Look, I I I also agree, by the way, there are far too many, there are far too many crimes that rise that are criminal in this country, meaning that there are far too many statutes that have a criminal penalty.
Uh we can't even keep it straight as to how many there are.
There are thousands of them.
Even the federal government doesn't know how many federal statutes really have a criminal penalty attached to them.
There's rampant overcriminalization, and as we know, it's very there's something wrong with a country that has people serving real time in prison for selling or traffic, selling marijuana marijuana possession at some level.
And this does disproportionately affect minority communities, of course.
It's been that's has been pointed out many times before.
When you have some states now that are doing this and allowed to do it by the federal government.
So if you're in Colorado, they the federal law doesn't apply, but if you're in New York State, although we've had some decriminalization here, if you're in some other states, if you're in Texas, you better not get caught with a big bag full of weed because you could be in a lot of trouble.
There's something wrong about that.
There's something that I find uh I find troubling.
I want to talk to you about uh the Middle East for a moment here before we come to a close on the show.
So uh just please, as I said, go to Facebook.com slash Buck Sexton like the page, and I'm gonna be back in just a minute.
We're gonna talk about the Islamic State.
Be right back.
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Now I know that I can see every line here is pretty much filled up with people who want to talk about cops.
I just wanted to share with you a quick uh a quick analysis of what I think is happening with our troops in Iraq, because we do very much have troops in Iraq.
Uh And I think that it's important that we begin to speak about it in that context.
We have a few thousand troops who are in that country, which is in the midst of a civil war.
And the latest here today from the Wall Street Journal is that there are preparations being made to send hundreds of American military advisors to a base in Anbar province, which puts them even further out into the fight.
Now, some are saying that there won't be deployed as sort of uh forward uh forward deployed as spotters for air strikes, and they won't actually be engaged in frontline combat themselves.
But as we know from what happened in Ramadi recently, Anbar province is very much a battlefield, and it's only a matter of time as I see it before the administration is forced uh to accept the fact that they have put troops into harm's way again.
Now, this also comes the same week that the administration has admitted that President Obama has admitted that there's no real strategy to deal, no complete strategy to use their verbiage to deal with the Islamic State.
And I would say that that's not really true.
There's no complete strategy if the purpose of all this is to find a way.
Um the purpose of all this is to find a way to delay.
I'm sorry, if the purpose is to find a way rather to destroy, but if the purpose is to delay, then they very much have achieved the strategy.
They're not going to destroy the Islamic State with what they're doing.
The air strikes against ISIS or ISIL, which still the administration insists on saying ISIL all the time.
They're not going to destroy the uh the Islamic State with what they're doing.
They know that.
And if you look at other air campaigns, as has been pointed out for months now, this is a trickle, not a downpour.
This is minimalist strikes without a willingness to really go after the enemy hard and to try and change reality on the ground to the degree you can with air power, which is always difficult, and you can't fully do what you want just from the air.
We know this.
The strategy is air power from us and coalition partners to some extent and allies on the ground.
It will be the government of Iraq, the popular mobilization forces, which is a nice way of saying the Shia militias and the Kurds, their Peshmerga.
We're supposed to work with all those pieces in order to push ISIS out of Iraq.
And keep in mind, even if that happens, you still have the Islamic State operating in their Syrian sanctuary and pushing their boundaries there as well.
Very much entrenched.
It doesn't look like Assad is anywhere near able to defeat them.
So that's the reality of the is the situation right now with the Islamic State.
They're not going to destroy ISIS.
They're hoping to delay and they're hoping to contain ISIS to some degree.
Now, this is interesting because from a political perspective, the president gets to keep saying that he's ended the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when in fact we do have troops on the ground in Iraq and Iraq is at war, and we still have troops very much on the ground in Afghanistan, and we are at war with the Taliban in that country.
Nonetheless, the President likes this talking point.
He continues to say it.
I believe that he hopes that he can maintain to some degree the status quo and hand off this very difficult and uh bloody situation.
As we know, the casualties in Syria are estimated to be two hundred and fifty thousand, tens of thousands killed in Iraq, massacres of Christians, men, women, and children brutally murdered by this marauding terrorist army, which is what the Islamic State is.
It is a terrorist army, it's not just a terrorist group.
That's all been happening while we've, as a as our White House essentially, has decided they're going to wait it out.
Make it someone else's problem.
Now, this is one this is one way to go, obviously, and I think the president would say that all things considered, as long as he's not as long as there are no U.S. casualties occurring, that's his only that's his only consideration.
And if he was willing to say that and honestly state that position, I'd have to give him more credit.
If his position was no U.S. casualties, that is first and foremost our only priority.
Does not matter how much of a meat grinder the situation is with ISIS, does not matter how many civilians are being killed, he won't go in there.
Now that would of course refute things like what we did in Libya, what of course would be President Hillary Clinton was pushing for in Libya, which was regime change under the auspices of an of a humanitarian intervention, right?
So sometimes we intervene on a humanitarian grounds, and other times we don't.
We've got to be honest about that.
The administration does not want to be, but That's the truth.
But we also need to come to grips with the fact that the Islamic state is increasingly looking like a state.
They function as a state.
They are providing services.
Yes, they amputate hands and they act like a bunch of medieval savages in a number of ways, but they are maintaining control over a large, uh large contiguous territory in between Syria and Iraq.
And the truth is that the forces that we're hoping are going to defeat them don't really want to have that job.
Shia militias don't want to go into Sunni land and Anbar and elsewhere to try to push out uh the ISIS forces that are there, and if they do, it'll be on a temporary basis.
They're not going to want to patrol the streets and provide security.
I know many of you served, and many of you have your own memories and and your own sense of what happened in Iraq before, and that obviously guides what we think is happening now.
There is no real strategy to deal with the Islamic State.
There's just delay.
That's from the administration.
And as all that's going on, the Islamic State is becoming a more entrenched entity that will be harder and harder to remove, to eliminate.
The idea that we're going to degrade and destroy.
We're barely degrading.
We're actually just containing the Islamic State.
That's what the policy is now.
It's containment, which by the way, is being fooled is being foiled rather, and I guess to some degree fooled, by the fact that there's another level of this.
There's also the expansion of the brand of ISIS to other countries, to other states.
You have this now happening in Libya, in the Sinai Peninsula region of Egypt.
There's ISIS now in Afghanistan.
There's ISIS popping up elsewhere as well.
They are franchising.
They are expanding beyond the borders of what used to be Syria, because Syria is not really a country anymore, and a de facto partitioned Iraq.
We can hope to contain them in there, but the fact of the matter is that as long as the ideology is very much alive, and as long as there's this uh not just a social media presence, but also a sort of launch pad for attacks in the region and around the world, and it's only a matter of time before they hit us, they'll be able to expand regardless of what the situation on the ground is in Iraq and Syria because it's not about just holding that territory.
It is like a virus.
If some of it manages to escape, it can spread, and it is spreading now across the broader Middle East, and the administration can't be honest with you about what they're planning because if they really told you that all of this is just meant to delay, then we'd have to start asking questions about well, what was all this for in the first place?
And why can't the president be honest with the American people about this?
Gotta take a break here.
I'll be back in a minute.
Buck Sexton here in for Rush Limbaugh.
Got to close out the show today.
I want to thank, of course, Rush and uh the team here.
Gentlemen, thank you very much for having me on as always.
Um it's been great to have a chance to talk to you here.
Please go to Facebook.com slash Bucks Exton, like the page.
You can also find out more about me at the Blaze.
Go to the Blaze.com slash Buck Sexton and download my shows there.
And uh I would also say that if you haven't checked it out already, apparently MSNBC has a comparing Voldemort to the GOP candidates graphic because nothing is too crazy for them at this point.
I figure why not?
Uh they they've put up a Voldemort versus GOP candidates graphic.
I kid you not, I saw it myself here on one of the monitors, and I was like, they've got to be kidding.
All right, that's gonna close it out for me.
As I said, thank you all very much uh for listening.
I much appreciate your time.
You're gonna uh send me some tweets at Buck Sexton, and hopefully I'll have a chance to come hang out with you here on the EIB again soon.
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