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Dec. 31, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:17
December 31, 2015, Thursday, Hour #3
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Buck Saxon here in 4 Rush.
I'm the host of the Buck Saxon Show on the Blaze Radio Network.
You can check that out at theblaze.com/slash radio.
Also, on the Blaze TV, 7 Eastern every night, check out the Buck Saxon show.
Please do so.
Going into 2016, I think it's fair to take a look at the state of national security, both at home and abroad.
I think it's a worthwhile exercise to look at what the benchmarks were that were set up by the administration for success and where we actually are.
And in no place do I think there's a bigger chasm between promises and reality when it comes to national security than with President Obama very openly and explicitly saying that he would end wars.
He'd be the one who ended wars, the president who ended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere.
He has not done so.
In fact, he gave us a date for the end of the war in Afghanistan.
It's supposed to end in 2014.
As we know, that is very much still an active combat zone.
And as a tragic reminder that we just lost six Americans on December 21st when a suicide bomber rammed a motorcycle that was full of explosives into a patrol car here in New York City, where I'm broadcasting from,
there were thousands of police and U.S. military service personnel on the streets of Manhattan yesterday paying respects to NYPD detective and Air National Guard Sergeant Joseph Lem.
So we are still very much at war in Afghanistan.
President said that that war would be over.
It is not.
By the way, we're still at war in Iraq.
It's now been said we've deployed U.S. special forces to Syria as well.
We have troops.
We have advisors on the ground in Iraq.
And with Libya, we broke it.
We had that whole intervention, which Hillary and Brock both pushed for.
Hillary, by the way, pushed for that very aggressively.
And it's just a matter of just give that some time before you can expect there to be more of an official U.S. presence there.
But on Afghanistan, right, this was the war that President Obama had always set up from the very beginning as, if you want to just put it in very broad-stroke terms, the good war.
Iraq was the war of choice.
Afghanistan was the war we had to fight.
So Obama was going to make sure that he was the commander-in-chief that figured out Afghanistan, that he was going to get it right where his predecessor had failed.
And now we see the end result of all of this.
Washington Post story won't get that much attention because late in the year, but it should get a lot more attention.
That's why I want to talk to you about it.
A year of Taliban gains shows we haven't delivered.
It seems the media is rediscovering the war in Afghanistan, just in time, of course, for the Obama administration to be handing it on to the next guy, Origal, as the case may be.
The anti-war crowd, as you know, has been pretty quiet while these conflicts have dragged on.
But according to the Washington Post here, what do we have to show for now going on, what, 14 years of war in Afghanistan, going into our 15th year of war in Afghanistan?
What do we have to show for all of that effort, all of that blood and treasure, all the expenditures of personnel and resources?
Remember, this is the place where we had to go.
The war on terror began.
We had to invade Afghanistan after 9-11.
Here we are looking at what's happened.
President Obama surged troops there.
Remember, he drew down on Iraq.
Iraq is now carved up in part by the Islamic State.
And we'll get into what's happened in Ramadi in just a few minutes.
Drew down in Iraq, and then you had the rise of ISIS.
In Afghanistan, he figured, well, probably shouldn't make that same mistake again and let this country just rapidly deteriorate.
And so he's kept troops there.
He's extended beyond what he said he would.
And the media is kind of taking a poke at this, taking a look at this and saying, hold on a second.
I guess things aren't going so well.
This is from the Washington Post.
With control of or a significant presence in roughly 30% of districts across the nation, according to Western and Afghan officials, the Taliban now holds more territory than in any year since 2001.
Here's another way of phrasing this: the Taliban is now in its strongest position since the initial U.S. invasion after 9-11, after they hit the towers of the Pentagon.
The Taliban's in its strongest position since then.
Right now, there are some anecdotal stories they pepper into this account.
They point out that so far this year, 7,000 members of the Afghan security forces have been killed, 12,000 injured.
That is a 26% increase over the number of dead and wounded in all of 2014.
Attrition rates are soaring.
People are leaving.
Afghans are leaving the Afghan security forces because, for one, they say that the Taliban is more sophisticated and well-armed than they are.
And it's stronger and more sophisticated than it's been in years.
Are you hearing much about this?
How much time, how much of the media's attention and the White House's attention has been on this war in the last three months and the last six months?
Compare the attention given to this versus the attention given to, oh, I don't know, the whining of Mizu protesters.
The attention given to a bunch of students on Yale's campus who aren't familiar with the intent or the wording of the First Amendment.
Don't really believe in free speech per se.
Don't believe in free speech at all.
How much time is spent on that versus on what's going on in this war, the war that we have been fighting for over a decade now?
They are, and this is back to this Washington Post piece, American and Afghan officials are voicing increasingly grim assessments of the resurgent Taliban threat, and they are saying this is not going well.
Abdullah Abdullah, who's the country's chief executive, he says, we haven't delivered.
We're not meeting the people's expectations.
Our forces lack discipline.
They lack rotation opportunities.
We haven't taken care of our policemen and soldiers.
They continue to absorb enormous casualties.
Case in point here, Helmand down in southern Afghanistan along the border with Pakistan.
That was a focus of the American surge effort there under President Obama's time in office back in 2010.
There was a surge of 30,000 troops.
Marines launched operations there, and the Taliban, by the end of it in 2012, had been pushed out.
Now, keep in mind, by the way, as all this is happening, Mullah Omar has been dead for two years.
I mean, their top leader is gone.
They've got Akhtar Mohamed Mansour as the new leader of the Taliban.
And somehow, with Mullah Omar, who was their leader and somebody with a lot of credibility and jihadist circles, him gone, and with him gone, it doesn't necessarily mean anything for their fighting capabilities.
They've been able to continue on.
In fact, they're seizing more territory.
They are a more dangerous insurgent threat now than they were before.
And in Hellman province, again, along the Pakistani border, there are some places where in the district, electricity bills are being paid directly to the Taliban.
There is a lot of opium production there, which, of course, is used to fund much of the Taliban insurgency.
And they are getting stronger.
This is the province that was supposed to be held up as the success story.
This was supposed to be the model.
You've got the Afghan army with its entire 215th Corps based in Hellman province with more than 18,000 soldiers.
There are thousands of Afghan police soldiers, police officers, rather.
And yet, hundreds of Taliban fighters here and there, according to this piece in the Post, just overrun them.
They are beating for them.
And now you have Afghans, Afghanis and parts of Marja, for example, hoping for the return of U.S. troops and British forces because they do not believe that their own indigenous forces can get it done.
This is all the same stuff we've been hearing for years, by the way.
The Afghan forces don't have the logistics capability.
They don't have the equipment they need.
I mean, this is a long haul.
This is tough getting this force up to speed.
And they're now saying that not only are they not up to speed, but they're in danger in places of being overrun.
There was that seizure of a city in northern Afghanistan, what was that weeks or perhaps now a few months ago?
And that was something of a shock.
People said, wait a second, the Taliban could seize a major city in northern Afghanistan.
I thought we had beaten the Taliban.
I thought the Obama administration was focusing in on this issue.
A laser-like focus, you could say, because this was the war that President Obama promised would be won and over by 2014.
Remember, he surged troops and told us when the troops were coming out at the same time.
Not exactly a winning strategy.
But I guess you could call it a strategy.
And in that sense, it maybe is different from what we've seen in Syria, which is discussion of a strategy without implementation.
I'll get to that in just a few moments.
We are still at war in Afghanistan going to the last year of the Obama presidency, despite what the media may focus on or not.
It doesn't change the fact that not only is the Taliban seizing more territory, and as I said, in the strongest position it's been in in over a decade, as Obama's getting ready to leave office, or in the last year of his presidency, I should say.
You also have an ISIS affiliate, an Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan that's growing, and you have the people of this country increasingly realizing that their own security forces aren't going to be able to protect them, don't have the ability, and in some cases, don't have the will.
They're leaving.
How long before Afghanistan collapses?
How long before the Taliban encircles Kabul?
I can't tell you the exact answer, but I know this much.
Given the way things are going right now, given the trajectory in that country, it's just a matter of time before the place deteriorates.
And we won't have heard much about it.
It'll be something that the media has kept quiet for a number of years here.
And by the time the lack of attentiveness from the White House is far too apparent, it'll be somebody else's problem.
Just like Iraq and Syria, by the way, which is what we'll talk about in just a minute.
Buck Sexton here in for Mr. Rush Limbaugh today on the EIB.
I hope you are getting ready for your New Year's Eve celebration, whatever that may be.
800-282-2882.
For more on me, to download my daily show.
You can go to theblaze.com/slash Buck Sexton.
Please do.
There was a, you could call it an indicator from the Iranians recently.
We used to call this in the Intel community.
It is an indicator, something.
I mean, we have signed this deal, right?
We've got this deal.
President Obama pushed very hard to get this nuclear deal with Iran done.
I don't have the time today to go through all the details of it.
I'm sure you're familiar with much of it.
Wasn't a good deal.
We didn't really get anything in the bargain other than Obama got a deal.
We'll see how it plays out over the years.
No hard concessions from the Iranians, but you would think that there might be, if not gratitude from the Iranian regime, which, well, we know we're not going to get that, right?
I mean, you know, death to America and all that.
But there might be a moment of pause before they decide to rattle their saber in our direction, before they decide to show us whatever the opposite of goodwill could be.
Whatever goodwill they should show, they go in the opposite direction.
You'd think maybe they might slow that down a little bit.
They might just say, hey, we've got this deal we shouldn't push.
But as you know, they've got Americans in custody for preposterous charges.
They have not released them.
And most recently, and this courtesy of FoxNews.com, they're firing missiles near our ships.
According to Fox, the most recent confrontation occurred Saturday when five Iranian Revolutionary Guard vessels approached the USS Harry Truman, and one of them fired multiple unguided missiles within 1,500 yards of the U.S. aircraft carrier transiting the Strait of Hormuz.
It was the third such provocation in the past 14 months, according to a spokesman for the Navy's Fifth Fleet.
So, you know, they're just firing missiles in our general direction close to our ships.
It's getting closer, according to Commander Kevin Stevens, quoted here in this piece on Fox.
I mean, what if the Iranians did hit one of our warships?
You start to think about this now.
You play it out in your head.
You take this to the next level.
What would they do?
Sorry, bro, Toad's an accident.
Didn't mean to ding your Nimitz-class supercarrier.
It's not going to fly.
That won't work.
If the Iranians, even in a miscalculation, hit one of our ships, what would the administration's response be?
I ask because we know that they've been willing to essentially mortgage the rest of any sort of Middle East foreign policy in order to get this deal done.
Whatever it took to get this thing signed, Obama was willing to do.
And you could draw a pretty straight line between some of the inaction and lack of leadership shown on Syria to the president's willingness, or rather the president's hope that he would not be agitating the Iranians unnecessarily.
And it doesn't want to annoy the mullahs in Tehran because we need to get a deal with them.
And so that means we don't want to get too deep into the weeds in Syria because, as you know, the Iranians have, well, they have boots on the ground in Syria.
They've sent in proxy forces.
They're very much involved.
They've got Hezbollah.
They've got all kinds of activities going on in Syria that are meant to strengthen the Shia hand there.
You've got this Sunni-Shia civil war playing out across the broader Middle East.
And it would take a real strategic mind, somebody who has both an understanding of what's going on in the region and a very firm grasp of what the U.S. role and what U.S. leadership should be in dealing with it.
I think we pretty clearly have not had that with this White House.
And that's putting it mildly and far too kindly.
But the Iranians now fire missiles in the general direction of our ships.
They've also tested out missiles in violation of UN and UN agreements.
And yet the Obama administration now says they have new sanctions they're going to unveil.
Oh, okay.
In that case, they've got new sanctions.
These will be different from the other sanctions, right?
There's some sanctions relief.
We give them $150 billion of unfrozen assets or over $100 billion, whatever the final number turns out to be.
Doing all these things to try to generate the momentum to get a deal so that President Obama and the Democrats have a deal before he leaves office.
Now they've got it.
And the Iranians' behavior, I think, shows us exactly what we should expect already and in the future.
Firing missiles at us, doing whatever they can to undermine U.S. interests in the region.
Remember, this is a country that was choosing to support militias that were killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
And we've never held them accountable for that.
We've never taken action as a result of that.
We've just sort of allowed diplomacy to continue on, right?
The Obama administration talks to them, tries to figure all this stuff out.
That's what's going on with the Iran side of the equation.
And then we've got Iraq and Syria.
You may well have seen the headlines this week that the Iraqi security forces have retaken Ramadi.
Ramadi, a city that many of you who have served or family members or friends of those who have served, is known as being a place that the U.S. and the coalition had to clear out some years ago because it was full of, what were at the time, foreign fighters, part of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And now it's the Islamic State that has seized Ramadi and held it for many months, held it with mere hundreds of fighters surrounded by thousands and thousands of Iraqi government troops.
We are supposed to believe going to New Year that this is evidence of a turning of the tide, I suppose.
But the truth is, this is really a very low bar for success for the Iraqi government.
Remember, Obama came into office.
The Iraqi government out of Baghdad was in control of its territory.
And now it has taken back one major Sunni city after months of occupation by the Islamic State.
And still the largest Sunni majority city in all of Iraq, Mosul, is in the hands of the Islamic State going into 2016.
So what really is success here?
And what is just staunching the bleeding?
What is stopping the losses that have been occurring of territory?
I think those are fair questions to ask as much of the media is reporting on this as though, well, see, the strategy is working, the strategy of the Iraqi government, and of course, the Obama administration alongside them.
It's going to be a long, hard fight.
But just as with some of these other issues, Afghanistan and elsewhere, it's not going to be the Obama administration's problem.
Delay and deflect.
That's the policy that they've instituted.
800-282-2882.
Buck Sexton back in a minute.
Yes, indeed.
It is Buck Sexton here in Farush Limbaugh on New Year's Eve, not to be confused with Christmas Eve, as some may have done on the radio at a previous point in their life.
But yes, indeed, 800-282-2882.
Also, please go to theblaze.com slash Buck Sexton.
You can download my show there.
You can watch the Buck Sexton Show on TV at 7 Eastern, Monday through Friday on The Blaze TV.
Let's take some calls.
Scott in Texas, you're on the Rush Limbaugh show.
You're speaking to Buck Sexton.
Good afternoon, Mr. Sexton, and happy new year to you and your family.
Same to you, sir.
I really respect your expertise on everything.
I'm not looking very forward tomorrow.
I live here in Texas.
I live only 20 minutes away from the Mexican border.
I'm not looking very forward to tomorrow because that's when the open gun carry goes into effect here in Texas.
And I have spoken to the police departments here in the Rio Grande Valley, and they've told me that anybody that looks suspicious is be carrying an open gun.
They're going to check them out and see if they got a license to carry it.
My problem is it's going to really interfere with the police work and their time and put a lot of pressure on our local police and our law enforcement.
I think it's a bad call.
It terrifies me to see somebody walking down the street with an open gun on their side that, you know, that and I think it's going to cause a lot of problems in the state of Texas.
Qualified minorities going to be able to carry this too.
I think they might be getting singled out because there's a lot of crime in Houston and the bigger cities.
Okay, Scott, hold on.
I think we can assuage some of your fears here if we unpack this a little.
First of all, I'm going to tell you right off the bat, I don't think there's anything to be afraid of.
I think that this makes sense.
And let me tell you why.
For one, Texas already has among the highest number of concealed carry license holders in the country.
So you've got over 800,000 people in the state of Texas who are concealed carry.
So you've got people walking around that are carrying handguns.
You've got citizens that are exercising their Second Amendment rights all the time already.
So that's already happening.
So there are people around you, if you're at the store or you're out and about who are carrying, and you just don't know that they're carrying.
This now just means that people can open carry handguns as opposed to open carrying shotguns and rifles, which that's allowed.
So I don't really know what if your concern is that the police will react badly to this or overreact.
I can understand that.
I don't think that would be the case in most places in Texas, although I don't live in Texas and I can't speak for how law enforcement's going to respond to this.
But in terms of your safety, I would think it's it doesn't why would it make any difference to your safety if people are carrying openly versus people are carrying concealed?
I mean, they're carrying either way, right?
They're people walking around with guns, and we could get into all the evidence about how more law-abiding citizens exercising their Second Amendment rights means less crime.
And that's a whole other discussion we could have.
But I don't think you should have anything to be concerned about unless is this really just the issue of law enforcement, how law enforcement reacts to seeing people carrying a, you know, carrying a 9mm on their hip instead of an AR over their shoulder.
I mean, is that your worry?
Well, my worry is, how do I know these people that are carrying these guns on the side have a permit or not, and if they're good guys or bad guys?
I mean, when they're carrying a concealed gun, if they pull their gun out, people are going to take action.
Other people that carry concealed guns will take action, as I will, if somebody pulls a gun out and starts shooting somebody.
I'm not going to run.
I'm going to try and help out.
But these people are going to be carrying open guns on their side, and I do believe there's going to be quite a few of them.
How do I know they've got a permit or not?
That's the whole problem.
And how do I know that somebody that's not mentally ill is going to try and take their gun away?
We have a problem here in the state of Texas with criminals and bad guys trying to take guns away from police officers and use them on here to police officers or other people.
Scott, I thank you for calling in.
I'm still not, and thanks, Scott.
I'm still not seeing why that is.
You're saying, well, people are carrying guns, and so that means that they could, well, yeah, but they could also be carrying concealed.
And we're talking people that are trying to legally carry.
Never mind, criminals.
You don't care what they're carrying or how they're carrying it.
So I'm not able to follow that line of concern beyond there might be some cops that aren't used to seeing so many people walking around with a gun on their hip or a shoulder holster or whatever.
And so they may, but, you know, this regulation's on the books now.
This is the law.
So I don't see how this could be a problem.
I think this is a good thing.
That's just me.
Wish we had it in New York City.
Try getting a gun in New York.
You know, you got to show up.
You got to get fingerprinted.
Then you got to go out to this one place where they do another set of fingerprinting.
And then you got to do this other thing where you fill out a form and you fill out a form a few more times.
And then they have an interview.
And then you do more forms.
And then a couple of days later, they slap your face to wake you up because you've passed out in the waiting room.
And then in six months and $500 later, maybe you get a premise permit.
That's how it works here in New York City.
So those of you in Texas, enjoy your Second Amendment rights because they don't exist everywhere.
Certainly don't exist here in the Big Apple.
Let's take Lance in Philadelphia.
Lance, this is the Rush Limbaugh Show.
You're speaking to Buck.
Hey, Buck.
One of the things that is a nonsensical statement is what is known as the lone wolf, the lone Muslim wolf.
Muslims or wolves live in dens, and the den that these lone wolves share in common is Islam.
Well, jihadist terrorist Muslims perhaps live in a den that is full of other jihadist terrorists, but let's not paint with too broad a brush, sir.
Lance, thank you for calling in.
Who else do we have here?
David in.
Wait, hold on a second.
I'm trying to see what we got here.
Oh, yeah.
Mike in Florida.
Let's go with that.
Can we get Mike in Florida online?
Mike.
Hey, Buck.
Hey, what's up?
Good afternoon.
Good afternoon.
You were just discussing open carry in Texas with a gentleman.
I'm in Florida where we still have concealed.
And my beef with open carry is more from a safety standpoint of the person that's actually carrying.
If you have open carry, most people that are carrying aren't trained on how not to lose their firearm in a hand-to-hand combat fight like a police officer or someone in the military is.
And also, the component comes into play where if you are in a situation where there's going to be an active shooter and he sees you carrying, you're going to probably be the first one he takes down before he does anything else because you're the immediate threat.
And to me, the mystery of who's carrying and who's not is what makes concealed carry an effective weapon.
Well, concealed carry definitely has advantages when it comes to deterring criminal activity or in an active shooter situation, right?
I mean, as you said, part of it is that there's a second-order effect of, well, if there's concealed carry allowed in a certain area, whether it's a state or a county or whatever the case may be, the bad guys essentially can't know when they're in a bank or a store or wherever, if the guy standing next to them or in front of them has actually, you know, is packing, is actually armed.
So there's an advantage to that because even if there's nobody armed, the criminal has to at least keep that in mind, right?
And that might change patterns of behavior, and that then keeps them perhaps off balance, right?
Because you can never have perfect security.
You never have any way of preventing all of these kinds of problems, but you can do things that will at least help in that process, right?
So, but open carry, whether someone might lose their keep in mind, in Texas, you already have open carry of rifles, right?
So if some lunatic wanted to grab someone's gun and wrestle it from their hands and then try to use it for whatever shooting incident, they could already do that.
I mean, in the case of now, you're just adding handguns into it.
And my understanding for the Texas, by the way, for the Texas open carry law is that it's going to be, there's all kinds of box checking exercises you have to go through in order to be able to do this.
So you're going to have to pass a background check, psychological check.
I think you have to take a class and even pass maybe a basic marksman's course, a marksmanship course.
And so there's some checks and balances there, but there's no perfect, you know, there's really no perfect system for this, right?
And I think open carry is, I think it's people sometimes take some comfort in knowing that somebody, you know, they're at the McDonald's or they're, you know, at the store and they're walking around and they see a guy or a gal who's open carrying, all right, there's somebody here who's, you know, if things go, if anything goes bad, you know, we've got somebody here who could help out.
And I think that there's a psychological benefit to that for all around.
But that's there are many different, many different ways of looking at this.
But I certainly don't see anything negative coming from this in the state of Texas, although there could be that possibility of law enforcement overreacting.
All right, let's take one more, then we'll go into a break.
Dave in Fort Wayne, Indiana, you are on the Rush Limbaugh show.
You're speaking to Buck.
Hi, Buck.
Thanks for taking my call.
I just noticed President Obama's speech after San Bernardino.
One word that he stressed strongly was values.
And I feel like that word has now been hijacked by the Democrats.
The Democratic debate, Hillary used the word strongly.
Bernie Sanders used it.
But these are not American values wanting to reject Syrians coming into the country.
And I just felt it was another way the Democrats were trying to tell us how to think.
And the Syrians and the Muslims, their values are not our values.
And I think that's one thing that I just wanted to kind of bring up, how words are powerful tools and how the president and the Democratic candidates all of a sudden have grabbed onto that word.
Well, Dave, I can say this.
The Democrats are very good at playing word games.
They understand the power of controlling certain words.
And I thank you for calling it from Indiana.
I object, for example, very much to the usage of the term liberals for people in this country who are of the left, who are progressives, who are Democrats.
They are anti-liberal, as we know.
They have hijacked that term, which would be much better applied to, in many ways, classical liberalism is American conservatism, really.
But that's not how we describe them.
It's not how we talk about them.
And I think that's a shortcoming of language that we currently have.
And I mean, as for Syrian values and Muslim values, there's a span, there's a spectrum.
If somebody believes in Sharia, if they believe in the elevation of a divine Islamic law over the Constitution of American law, well, then yeah, of course, there's a values conflict there.
But as we know, there are some who are secular, some who are Christian, and some who are nominally Muslim who are seeking refuge elsewhere.
So a broader, more complicated discussion than I have time for now because I actually have to go into a break or I'm going to run out of time.
Buck Sexton here in for Rush, 800-282-2882.
Let's talk a bit about New Year's Eve, but security precautions more than champagne.
That's coming.
Buck Sexton here in for Rush today on the EIB.
Please follow me on Facebook at facebook.com slash BuckSexton.
You can also send me messages there.
Hopefully they'll include nice things like Happy New Year's, maybe some critiques or compliments.
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On the show.
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All right.
The NYPD is out in force, and they are saying they're going to make the New Year's Eve celebration here in Times Square, a mere blocks from where I am broadcasting to you.
They're going to make it the, quote, safest place in the world.
That's what they've said.
There are about a million people expected to pack Midtown Manhattan for these festivities.
The NYPD is going to deploy about 6,000 cops.
They've got all kinds of emergency services personnel, heavily armed, rooftop patrols, bomb-sniffing dog handles, special counterterrorism unit.
My former unit, the NYPD Intelligence Division, will be on hand, I'm sure, as well, dealing with all of this.
And there will be a lot of people gathered together in Times Square.
Now, I think this is a very, I think it will be a safe place to be.
It also will be relatively warm, which is nice for those here in New York City.
But I also have to point out, I'm never really clear on the desire to be sort of standing outside for many, many hours penned in in this way.
People really want to do this, though.
They love doing the ball drop in Manhattan.
So, hey, to each his own.
That's cool.
Olive Garden, by the way, is charging, as I see here in the New York Post, $400 for a New Year's Eve dinner.
And that's not even the most because the Bubba Gump Shrimp Corporation restaurant, which is in Times Square, is charging $799 because they have an unobstructed view of the Times Square ball drop.
I mean, look, I'm a believer in supply and demand and all that.
But wow, $799 for Bubba Gump Shrimp Corporation is, that is a pricey tab.
Never mind the $400 for the Olive Garden.
I'm assuming that $400 gets you unlimited breadsticks, though.
So there's that, right?
Oh, I'm being told actually originally they did not have breadsticks as part of that.
That is just unconscionable.
But yeah, there'll be a big cell.
There'll be a huge celebration here in New York City.
You've got the police everywhere.
And I'm certainly hopeful and assuming that this will all be fine and that the only outcome of this that some of you may object to is that, wow, it's going to be a lot of OT for the overtime for the NYPD and various forces.
But no, that's good.
Everyone's got bills to pay, Christmas presents that need to take off the credit card.
But I think everything here in New York should be fine.
The NYPD is on it, which is a good thing.
I've done a very good job.
And yeah, of course, full disclosure, I used to work for the Intelligence Division, so I tend to think that they do a good job.
Got some very illustrious and hardworking colleagues over there.
But yeah, there's going to be quite a celebration in Times Square tonight.
Looking forward to it.
I should point out, by the way, that Brussels, Brussels, Belgium, has had to cancel its New Year's Eve celebration because of a terror threat.
And they said that there were emblematic sites that were being targeted in what could be an ISIS-inspired or perhaps an ISIS-linked plot, according to Fox News.
So some places are really on high alert.
We're going forth here in New York City with the largest single celebration, I believe, in the country.
I mean, a million people gathered in one place with the NYPD on Overwatch.
So I think everyone's going to be able to ring in a very happy new year and certainly wish that for all of you across the country as well.
And I appreciate that some of you have let me keep you company as you make your New Year's Eve preparations.
So with that in mind, I'm going to go into a break here.
This is Buck Sexton in for Rush Limbaugh.
Got some final New Year's Eve wishes for you on the flip side here.
I'll be back in a minute.
Yes, Buck Sexton here.
Going to be closing it out in just a minute.
Thank you so much for joining me here on the EIB today.
It's always a pleasure.
I really appreciate it.
When Rush and the team, it's like getting the keys to the Ferrari thrown to you for the day.
You get to just really enjoy yourself and let it rip.
Please do check out my TV show, which is on the Blaze TV, 7 Eastern, Monday through Friday.
And also, you can listen to the Buck Sexton show on the Blaze Radio Network.
That's theblaze.com slash Buck Sexton.
My New Year's Eve plans, I have to say, I wish I could tell you that I was going to some really awesome party where all the top celebrities will be.
I will probably be in pajama pants and enjoying some form of flourless chocolate cake.
And maybe I will watch the ball drop.
Maybe, if only because then I feel like I've participated in some capacity.
So this is my way of saying I hope all of you have.
Very exciting plans for New Year's.
And if you think that that plan that I just laid out is exciting, then great.
We agree.
Or perhaps you've got other stuff in mind as well.
Thank you as always.
This is Buck Sexton in for Rush.
And I'm out.
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