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Oct. 22, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:39
October 22, 2015, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of The Rush 24-7 podcast.
I want to tell you how weak.
I don't know whether it's going to be exploited.
That's a whole nother thing, but I'll tell you how weak the Democrat and Hillary position in this Benghazi hearing is.
I just had some congressman from Washington State, a guy named Smith.
The reason.
The reason for Benghazi, reason Benghazi happened was budget cuts due to a Republican government shutdown.
Greetings, my friends, great to have you, Rush Lindboy.
And we are back at it as promised yesterday.
Here for yet another three-hour excursion into broadcast excellence.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program's 800-282-288-2.
And the email address Lrushbo at EIBNet.com.
So I've been trying to do a number of different things simultaneously here, uh, assembling today's show prep data, and at the same time trying to focus and pay enough attention on the Hillary Clinton Benghazi hearings to at least be able to offer you some learned insight into this.
And I want to go back, I would just remind you of a point that I made about all this on Monday, and that is that all of this has been a media hype for the express purpose of when it's over,
being able to claim that the Republicans did not land a glove on Mrs. Clinton, that she showed up and that she looked good and that she was composed and that she triumphed over this, and the Republicans weren't able to do a thing about it.
That is the objective.
That is what the and by the way, there's that that's the script.
You know, everything in Washington is to one extent or another, to one degree or another, scripted, and in some cases well in advance.
So is this entire situation we think is unfolding spontaneously about the Paul Ryan and Speaker of the House story.
I don't know anything specific.
All I can offer you is my insight, my opinion, which is based on my intelligence guided by experience.
But I don't think that much of what we see coming out of Washington, particularly as it uh is is encapsulated in the daily media presentation called news.
I don't think there's anything really spontaneous.
I think it's all a script to one degree or another, and much goes on behind the scenes that we don't see and are not told about that is responsible for what we do see or read about or what have you.
I for example, I mean, I'll get into it in more detail as the program unfolds, but the Paul Ryan for Speaker of the House, I think that's been a done deal for days and maybe even weeks.
I don't think we would have gotten to this point if Ryan had not already gotten some assurances from the Freedom Caucus, the conservative House members that he was going to get enough support from them to even take it this far.
It's just not how professional and seasoned experts do it.
It's it's no different than a president having a very important summit with a foreign leader, let's say Reagan and Gorbachev.
Everything that they were gonna do was agreed to before they ever met.
And if they couldn't agree to it, they wouldn't meet.
So that when the actual summit or meeting takes place, it's made to look like it's all happening at that moment, but it really isn't.
All of it's too important to leave it to chance for both sides.
So you have all these meetings considering consisting of underlings and advisors, and you try to come to some kind of agreement before the actual confab or summit or meeting between the two principals.
Well, you would you could you almost apply the same kind of thing here to the Hillary Clinton Benghazi hearings, although there's uh admittedly and understandably far more spontaneity here because whatever questions and whatever line of attack the Republicans have, I don't think they've exposed it to Mrs. Clinton.
In fact, I've detected something that I actually suggested earlier this year on these hearings.
And I'll just briefly, before getting into that in detail, I suggested that in addition to, and maybe with even more emphasis than focusing on this email business, tie her to Libya.
She clearly wants to be seen as the person who vanquished Qaddafi.
Well, let her have it, because Libya is an absolute mess, just like the rest of the Middle East is.
But if she wants to be tied to Libya, do it.
And so far there have been a couple Republicans who have done a really bang up good job today of focusing her as the architect of what happened in Libya.
Benghazi just a parted that.
Taking out Qaddafi, who had become an ally of sorts, actually led to all kinds of messes being created, not just in Libya, but throughout the region.
And I think that the overall objective here, if it's not too late, if they could just focus on her incompetence as Secretary of State, with the emails in Benghazi folded in as part of it, could actually end up being somewhat of a surprise attack, and it would be effective.
Now, the biggest lie that I have heard yet, and it's we have a long way to go.
The biggest lie that that so far has as I guess become the identity of these hearings is that Hillary's top concern in Benghazi was the safety of American personnel there.
It really has been interesting to watch her contradict herself on this.
On one hand, she wants to be seen as owning it every owning it all, in charge of and knowing everything.
And then depending on the questions she gets, well, you know, that was sort of associates were dealing with that.
I don't quite recall, I'm not really sure.
So she wants it both ways.
She wants to be able to say that she was in total command, fully aware, making all the decisions, but then on certain things, not so much.
On certain things, it's impossible for one Secretary of State to know everything, Congressman.
That's not what I mean.
But I was aware of this.
No, I'm not aware of what my two associated.
No, that I didn't know that I can't dispute it.
But she wants it both ways here.
She also has said, to me, this is a hanging curveball waiting, and I don't know if they're going to do anything with it, uh, or maybe they already have.
Questioning is ongoing here.
She said there was no credible threat on the morning of 9-11, 2012.
Really?
There was no credible threat.
Why then did the State Department of Cairo issue an apology on that very day?
Well, we know why.
They issued an apology on 9-12 for something that hadn't happened yet because they had already laid the groundwork for blaming a video, and they were apologizing in advance, as they said, hoping to prevent any rioting or unrest if they could just, as good liberals do.
Hey, we sorry, we didn't really mean anything by you don't have to attack us.
There was a credible threat.
There was a credible threat across Egypt, a credible threat in Libya.
There were credible threats every day to say that there wasn't a credible threat, which takes me back, the biggest lie of all is that Hillary's top concern was the safety of the American personnel there.
That's not true.
And you can go back and listen to the families of any of the four who died there.
It was not her concern.
She's even been tripped up on that A couple times today.
In reality, Hillary Clinton's biggest concern was preserving the campaign lie that Obama had terrorism on the run.
You remember the Democrat Convention?
GM is alive and Al Qaeda is dead.
Whatever the phrase was, we had saved General Motors and we had vanquished terrorism, we beat Al Qaeda, we beat Bin Laden, bin Laden is dead, GM's alive, or whatever.
Remember they they have established a theme for their convention and their campaign.
And here comes Benghazi, and they cannot allow for what happened in Benghazi to deter their efforts here.
So the concoction of that video as the reason for the unrest in Benghazi and over in Cairo throughout the region.
That was a lie, and it was to preserve the campaign lie that Obama had terrorism on the run.
Every one and everything, including the truth, was sacrificed in order to preserve the lie that Obama had beat Al Qaeda by killing bin Laden and had saved the economy by reviving General Motors.
That's why the lie on the video was concocted.
It was about the election in 2012.
The evidence of that was clear when we saw Candy Crowley in the debate prior to that election, joined sides with Obama when Mitt Romney was about to score some big points on this whole Benghazi thing.
So there's much to uncover here.
I just don't know whether it's going to be, and even if it is, uh I don't know how it's going to be reported.
I mean, there's two ways of looking at this.
If any of you have had it on TV, when you see the wide shot of Mrs. Clinton sitting at the witness table, and then the long desk where sit our esteemed elected officials.
And one view of that picture is, and then they get a close-up of Mrs. Clinton, of course.
And you say to yourself, I can't believe this woman is on the cusp of becoming president of the United States.
Really?
To believe this.
The other view, the other way of seeing the optics today, is the way the drive-by's will position it for the low information voters.
And it'll go something like this.
A lonely, valiant and brave Hillary Clinton sits alone under the glaring lights, being interrogated by a nearly all white Republican committee on her role in American foreign policy in the Middle East.
That's probably how this whole thing is going to be portrayed at places like Yahoo News and Vox Media, wherever the low information crowd goes to get their news.
So the objective here, as I say, when this is all over, is to praise Mrs. Clinton for triumphing on her own and by herself, facing long odds.
Republicans didn't lay a hand on her, and now there's nothing stopping her quest for the White House.
That's what they hope to be able to say, and they'll say it regardless.
What happens here, especially since Biden decided he's going to stay dressed, keep his clothes on, and not run.
We'll take a break and be back after.
Views expressed by the host on this program have riveted the nation for 28 years and have served to blow up the once powerful and closely held monopoly of the drive-by media.
Which of course has made them angry and unstable and mean-spirited and extreme, and we are here up against it all.
800 282-2882, if you want to be in the program.
I can't honestly tell you, snurdly, if you've been watching any of this.
All right, now you'd have to agree.
Nobody's laid a hand on her here, right?
There is anybody casually watching this is not even going to have seen anything to make them sit up and say, wait, wait, wait, what just happened, right?
And I don't expect anything will like that happen.
That is why I tried to set it up for you on Monday by telling you what this is all about.
Now I want to go back, grab soundbites audio, uh audio soundlights 4 and 5.
I may have missed some of this.
Admittedly, I did.
I haven't been able to watch it wall to wall.
But I want to go back and play for you.
The montage we put together of Obama and other regime officials explaining what happened in Benghazi.
And as to the best of my knowledge, this has not even been brought up yet in these hearings.
I don't care how offensive this video was, and it was terribly offensive.
And we should shun it.
This video is disgusting and reprehensible.
It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage.
Let's be clear.
These protests were in reaction to a video that had spread to the region.
You had a video that was released by somebody who lives here, sort of a shadowy character, who is extremely offensive video.
The unrest we've seen has been in reaction to a video.
Sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world.
It was a spontaneous, not a premeditated response, a direct result of a heinous and offensive video.
I know there are some who ask, why don't we just ban such a video?
And the answer is enshrined in our laws.
Our Constitution protects the right to practice free speech.
Yeah, that's Obama at the United Nations anticipating questions from the tyrants and dictators that meet there.
Well, hey, why not just kill this video guy if he's caused you this much trouble?
And Obama says, remember now, America's not yet like your countries.
I just can't shoot these people.
But I can arrest them and put them in jail, which I have done.
Mrs. Clinton, January 23rd, 2013, Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Benghazi.
She testified, Senator Ron Johnson, Republican Wisconsin, said we were misled.
That there were supposedly protests, and an assault sprang out of that.
And that was easily ascertained that that was not the fact.
The American people could have known that within days.
And we knew soon that it wasn't that, and yet you continued to ascertain or say things that weren't true.
And you could have set the record straight much sooner than you did.
With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans.
Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they'd go kill some Americans?
What difference at this point does it make?
What difference does it make?
That is the seminal question.
That is why these hearings are taking place.
What difference does it make that four Americans are dead?
What difference does it make?
Why?
What difference does it make?
How?
Isn't the point that they're dead?
And this is how the Democrats and Mrs. Clinton have sought to deflect this from the get-go.
But I I'm not aware of any of this having been brought up yet.
There is a so far in these hearings, a focus on uh on her emails, and there are plenty of contradictions in them, there's no question.
But again, this email story's been out there for so long in the drip drip drip drip drip drip drip.
And many people, I think, are just and I speak specifically the low information voter.
Tired of it.
It hasn't led to anything.
Every day there's news about the emails, and there's nothing comes of it.
So what's the big deal?
And they begin to be suspect or suspicious of those who keep promulgating the story, lose interest in it.
Anyway, I um you know her opening statement, just a brief review.
I was it was overacted.
It was obviously scripted, which they all are.
Uh it was rehearsed.
I'm sure that Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the committee, the chairman here is Trey Gowdy.
Elijah Cummings from uh from Baltimore is the ranking Democrat.
And I'm sure the Clinton team wrote his remarks.
Or worked with him on it.
And that would not be anything wrong with that.
I'm not saying anything wrong with that, but I just suggesting that it probably happened.
But she was really overly dramatic.
And I think that in itself is evidence of how bad this is.
She she she basically having to pretend that she cares about people she left unprotected and undefended.
That's really what happened.
She's having to act today like she really cares.
That she left Americans unprotected and undefended, and she's trying to balance, yeah, I was in total control.
I'm running the show.
I didn't know about that, though, and I wasn't aware of that.
Can't know everything, not humanly possible.
Anyway, we'll keep monitoring.
Anything happens, I'll be sure pass it on.
By the way, there is there is one laugher that has occurred in the hearings.
This is what you call chutzpa.
Politico has the details.
Hillary Clinton said in the hearings today that she didn't conduct most of her official business as Secretary of State via email.
Yeah.
She didn't even have a computer in her State Department office.
She didn't do most of the business of Secretary of State by email.
She said this during her testimony.
She was being questioned by Indiana Republican Susan Brooks.
By the way, Jim Jordan of uh Illinois just launched his uh questioning, and it looks promising.
I hope we're rolling on that.
At any rate, uh Susan Brooks, Indiana Republican.
Clinton was asked to account for the lack of emails to and from State Department officials regarding the situation on the ground in Libya from 2011 to 2012.
The situation was deteriorating.
Remember, she thinks Libya is a great success story, vanquishing Qaddafi.
And yet the email trail between State Department officials and the regime regarding what was going on on the ground in Libya, 2011, 2012, there isn't much of one.
And Mrs. Clint said, Well, Congresswoman, I didn't really conduct most of the business I did on behalf of our country on email.
And the room just I don't know how it didn't erupt in laughter.
And this is her attempt, obviously, to relegate the email story to way over there out of the way.
It's irrelevant.
As those emails, I didn't even do most of my business in email.
I didn't even have a computer in my office at the State Department.
She said I conducted my business in meetings.
I read massive amounts of memos.
I read a great deal of classified information.
I made a lot of secure phone calls, and I was in and out of the White House all the time.
So she's saying just because it was not on her email doesn't mean she was not responding or reacting to any situation at hand.
So she's trying to say that this email thing you guys are all following, there's nothing to see there anyway, because I didn't do most of my business on email.
No, there were only 60,000 emails in that private server.
30,000 of which she deleted before anybody saw them, claiming they were about yoga and her daughter's wedding and gift registrations for the reception and all of that.
And the other 30,000 she deemed, oh, these are okay.
There's no I have no doubt there are all kinds of emails going back and forth, Mrs. Clinton and people in 2011-2012 about Libya, but they're gone.
And that's why she can say what she's saying here.
But you have to hand it to her while the entire political apparatus is trying to chase down Hillary Clinton's emails and to find some evidence of wrongdoing in there, here she comes today under oath.
I didn't emails.
I didn't do most of my business email.
I didn't even have a computer in my office.
And everybody's supposed to go, oh no, we've been snookered again.
Oh no, Mrs. Clinton's pulled the wool over our eyes again.
She said, there were a lot of things that happened that I was aware of and that I was reacting to.
If you were to be in my office in the State Department, I didn't have a computer.
I didn't do the vast majority of my work on email.
She said, I bet there's a lot of Sid Blumenthal's emails in there from 2011, too.
Brooks said, Well, we'll get to that later.
And Hillary said, Well, I don't want to give a mistaken impression about what I did and how I did it.
Most of my work was not done on email.
My closest aides, officials in the State Department, the rest of the government, as well as the White House and people around the world.
I talked to them in person.
I talked to them on the phone.
I didn't do email.
So in short, she's trying to tell everybody, you're chasing the wrong tail here because I there's nothing to see because I didn't do anything.
Hillary sent at least 60,000 emails.
None of that while she was in her office.
None of that was done from a computer.
None of it was State Department business?
Is that what we're being told now?
She only did email at home.
She didn't have a computer in the office.
And the email she did at home had nothing to do with Libya Benghazi.
Ready that.
Well, she can go up there.
I know she's under oath.
She can go up and say whatever she wants to say.
It's going to be up to Hillary opponents, interviewers, interrogators to expose it and get to the bottom of it, and that's just going to depend on what kind of energy level people have that they want to really expend on this.
Now, before we go to the phones, I want to take you back.
Um May 26th.
Right here on this program, the EIB network, right behind that.
The Golden EIB microphone.
How to focus America on Hillary's Libya failure.
And this is what I said back on May 26th.
Let's go back to Hillary and Libya.
Now we all know Mrs. Clinton's email snaffos, and we all know about her problems.
We all know about Hillary's genuine general incompetence as Secretary of State, and the fact that she didn't achieve much, and the fact that all the relevant emails have supposedly been deleted and are gone, is evidence of her incompetence.
They've hidden it, they've gotten rid of it, they've basically deleted evidence.
Okay, so how do we nevertheless tie Mrs. Clinton to the boondoggle that's Libya?
Benghazi is in Libya, and it's a boondoggle.
It was a disaster.
Four Americans dead, an attack, a terror attack that was known to be a terror attack in advance of its happening, which was lied about and blamed on a video, if you recall, okay.
So how do we overcome the media?
And how do we get the truth of Mrs. Clinton's operation and her incompetence to the people?
I mean, this woman wants to be the next president.
People deserve to know the truth about this and everything else regarding her tenure as Secretary of State.
Not that she's some savior, not that she's some brilliant Secretary of State, smartest woman in the world.
People need to know that she was a disaster from Russia to the Middle East to Libya to wherever she went, she was a disaster as Secretary of State, and Benghazi happens to be the poster for it.
The American media is not going to do that.
The drive-by media is not going to expose Mrs. Clinton, as you well know, they're going to circle the wagons and protect her, and they're going to try to destroy those who criticize her.
The American media is not even going to cover Libya as a post-Hillary disaster.
If anything, they're going to follow Hillary's lead and claim that Hillary was a great architect of a wonderful foreign policy achievement in Libya.
But just like Iraq is a post-Obama disaster, so is Libya.
All of the Middle East is a post-Obama disaster.
Meaning after Obama gained control of the foreign policy of our country, began implementing his agenda, it has been a disaster.
ISIS created, Al Qaeda reconstituted and growing.
There's no other word for it.
It's an ongoing disaster that is the direct result of a bunch of arrogant, condescending, incompetent leftists running American foreign policy.
The media not going to say any of that, obviously.
Now what you generally need in the media to persuade people, or to call people's attention to something is pictures.
Pictures are needed in order to attract and hold and focus people's attention.
If the media flooded the zone with before and after pictures of Libya, with the idea that Hillary was the architect of what happened there.
Pictures of Libya before Hillary, pictures of Libya after Hillary.
Pictures of Libya during Qaddafi and post-Gaddafi, because she's proudest of getting rid of him.
Even though he had become an ally in his latter days.
The pictures exist.
It's just a question of getting them out there.
We know the media isn't going to do it.
If she were Republican, then you would seen by now would have seen pictures of Libya post-Hillary and pre-Hillary, and you would have concluded already she's incompetent.
But she's not a Republican, she's a Democrat.
So they circle the wagons.
Now, if they show the emails, and a member of this committee did today, it was a great display, sat down.
So I want to show you something, Mrs. Clinton stacked a bunch of Hillary's emails on the desk.
If they showed the emails, this is the key, and these emails exist.
If they showed the emails from Hillary's team praising her for ownership of Libya with then a picture of Benghazi, it would negate whatever these phony emails praising her are.
Now, that's not going to happen in a drive-by.
So my suggestion, this is back in May of this year, May 26th.
My suggestion is the second best way to focus the people of the U.S. on Hillary's Libya disaster, and it's going to require the Republicans to play.
I mean, we conservative media can't do this by her, so the Republicans are going to have to do this.
They're going to, and this is the perfect occasion to do it here, these hearings.
They should make no bones about it.
They should note that Hillary's most significant accomplishment of Secretary of State is Libya.
She wants that.
Let her have it.
The word Libya must be tied to Hillary Clinton.
And I have to tell you, early on in these hearings, a couple of Republicans did just that.
That's why I perked up and took notice.
Because I think it does have at least some potential of exposing her incompetence.
Anyway, brief time out, your phone calls are coming up and more, so hang tough, folks.
All right, the video excuse was just discussed under questioning by Congressman Jim Jordan.
And he pointed out the contradictions.
He read two quotes where she talks about the video was responsible for all that happened, and then he quoted her as saying, everybody knows the film had nothing to do with it.
And then he said, Mrs. Clinton, why the disparity?
Why not just tell the American people the truth?
I did!
I did!
You're confusing things.
You're can't what I was talking to some president of foreign country at one point.
You know how we have to deal with things like that, and the other it was it was it was preposterous.
She was nailed on the fact that they all knew this video was a trumped-up excuse.
But she got off the ropes.
There was no damage done.
as far as I could tell, I mean, I gotta be honest here, and I'm just trying to squeeze watching this uh in in just a few short minutes here, and it's still ongoing.
Uh Jordan's time expired, and I didn't get to see the bulk of his questioning of her.
So I don't know what other facts that he had, and I'm sure he had a lot.
I don't know the impact uh that that he made on this.
I'm just saying that when he hit her with the direct contradiction of how on the one hand she's telling people, yeah, we know the film had nothing to do with it, and the other hand, still to this day, to this day she was citing the video and still using it in these hearings, still relying on it as the reason Benghazi happened.
I think, you know, it's easy to sit here miles away, not under the bright lights, not on television, but to me this seems like a slam dunk.
But then I fall back on something I realize more and more and more about Washington is that what we see is about ten percent of what's actually going on there.
And I'll explain that in greater detail as the program unfolds.
Let me grab a call, get one in here before the first hour expires.
It'd be uh Rick in Melbourne, Florida.
Thank you, sir for the call, sir, and I'm glad you waited.
Thanks, Rush.
Uh, thanks for taking my call.
Yes, sir.
Um the question I'm just dying for s one of the Republicans to ask Senator or um uh uh Mrs. Clinton is why did she not ask during that 2012 time period when she was getting all these briefings and having all these meetings, why did she not ask?
What does Ambassador Stevens think the security ought to be?
She they sent him in there initially saying he's the guy, he's got all the experience, we're gonna rely on him to tell us what the ground situation is, how long he should stay, what should we do?
Well, my now my my recollection is that he was telling them that there wasn't enough security, and he was asking for more, and it never came.
Yes, he was.
But but Senator or uh excuse me, Secretary Clinton keeps saying as though she didn't realize that that was the case, that she was letting lower level people make the decisions after claiming she was Ms. Detail, in on everything, single-handedly running the show on top of everything.
Oh, the underlings were dealing with the security question.
Right.
And the ambassador was somebody she knew, she handpicked him, she trusted his judgment, but apparently she didn't think to ask.
After the bombings, after they'd had some encounters with uh the folks there, she didn't think to ask.
What is the ambassador think we ought to do security-wise?
He just left it to the body.
Well, what is that?
Okay, look, you obviously are a thoughtful person, studied this.
What does that tell you?
There's a reason there has to be a reason for that.
He's asking for more security, she's not paying any attention to it.
What do you think?
I I think she just wasn't paying any attention.
I think the the emails that um when they were doing the comparison of the two sizes of emails from 2011 and 2012, and the staffers saying, I don't even think she realizes we have a presence there.
I just don't think she was even paying attention to the city.
Well, that's it.
I think she because he was writing the the ambassador, Stevens wrote constant memos, begging for more security.
He even threatened to leave his post if they didn't go get more security.
And you're saying, just make sure I understand, you don't think she ever even saw them.
Can't tell.
But if she did see them, she didn't care.
You're you know she she either saw them and didn't care.
The there was some political fallout that was gonna cost her to make the decision to send more security.
You know, she's not paying attention.
She was well, that's what you think didn't care enough to pay attention.
That is something there has to be something more than that.
She was bragging today about how he got to Libya.
Yeah, he's our embed.
He had to sneak over there on a boat, and she's bragging about this.
Yeah.
Bragging about his his experience, his judgment, and she even made a statement like we were depending on Ambassador Stevens to make the calls.
Well, I think that's all BS.
I don't think Stevens was there to be ambassador to Libya.
That was the post, but I don't think he was there for that.
And that's why his calls for security, they weren't related to what his real purpose was, which I think involved Syria.
But anyway, I've got to take a break.
If Hillary Clinton didn't have a computer in her office and didn't do most of her business on email, then why have an off the grid server at home in Chappaqua?
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