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April 14, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:28
April 14, 2016, Thursday, Hour #2
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No, I'm surprised anybody would think we would shoot down the Russian jets.
Who are we talking about here?
Would we shoot down Russian jets?
Well, yeah, but everybody's, why didn't we shoot down there?
Why didn't the Navy shoot down the Russian jets?
Are you kidding?
Greetings, welcome back.
Great to have you, Rush Limbaugh behind the Golden EIB microphone.
Fastest three hours in media.
800-282-2882, if you want to be on the program.
What happened was Communist jets rattled nerves aboard the destroyer Donald Cook.
They buzzed within yards of the ship.
It was in the Baltic Sea.
Provocative, yeah, but they were not a credible threat.
I'm reading this from Navy Times.
They were not a credible threat, according to a retired Navy commanding officer who reviewed photos and videos from the run-ins on Monday and Tuesday when unarmed Sukhoi Su-24 fighters flew within a thousand feet of the ship, once coming as close as 30 feet in what U.S. officials called simulated attacks.
On Monday, a low-flying Russian KA-27 Helix helicopter also appeared to take photos of the ship.
And the Navy, remember, no, there's two kinds of generals, admirals, head honchos in the Pentagon.
You have warrior generals, and then you have the political generals, the politically correct generals.
You have the generals trying to climb the ladder of success, according to politics, then you have the warrior generals.
And in a regime like this one, the warrior generals are going to be tough to find.
They're there, but they're not heard from much.
So what happens here is that they, well, that provocative simulating attack.
There was no reason to hit them back.
We're not at war with Russia, said Captain Rick Hoffman.
So it'd be one thing to be operating and have a threatening attack profile from somebody who might not recognize me, but that's not the case here.
Those communists knew who we were.
Now, if you have visual identification of the jet, you can see that it's not carrying weapons.
And if you don't detect any electronic emissions suggesting there was a missile lock, like they hadn't painted the ship inside the Russian cockpit, they hadn't locked on.
So they detected no threat whatsoever.
And the operative quote here from Rick Hoffman is, you don't get to kill people just because they're being annoying.
Tell that to ISIS.
Tell that to Boko Haram.
Tell that to the San Bernardino II.
By the way, speaking of which, you see that Apple got into that iPhone from the San Bernardino II.
And it turns out that they did not get assistance from a particular company.
Everybody thought it was an Israeli company that helped break or crack that iPhone.
Turns out they just, that the FBI essentially accepted bids from black and white hat hackers, you know, individual Joe Schmohacker.
And they let each one of these guys take a crack at it, and one person apparently got in.
And the FBI will not tell anybody how.
They won't divulge a secret, not even to Apple.
And now the story is that there's nothing on the phone anyway.
There was nothing there to get.
We got no data.
We got no intel from the phone.
The Turks did shoot down a Russian jet after it crossed into Turkish airspace for about two seconds.
And that could have been, and that was nothing more than annoying.
But the Turks, they had been explicitly clear to the Russians, stay out of our airspace.
The Russians claimed, hey, it was an accident, a navigational error, and they shot it down.
In fact, there was video.
There was crystal clear video.
It was like the whole thing was staged.
Normally in shootdowns like that, there's very little video of it.
It happens at a spontaneous moment.
Nobody aiming a camera.
This thing, all of that, that Russian-Turkish incident was captured from the moment the plane was hit to the pilot's parachuting out.
And that was more than annoying.
Anyway, you don't get to kill people because they're being annoying.
Standard operating procedure.
Yesterday on this program, right around this time, Megan Kelly had been reported by an NBC stringer to have snuck in to Trump Tower.
And everybody was wondering, hmm, lots of buzz.
What is going on?
Everybody was asking.
I made a prediction.
It wasn't that long ago that we learned that Megan Kelly was going to host a brand new celebrity slash newfangled Barbara Walters type interview program on the Fox Broadcast Network, not Fox News.
Remember that?
That's about a month or two old.
And it was going to be this big, big whoop-de-doo.
And to expand her career folio and all that and take it beyond Fox News to the Fox Broadcast Network.
You know, like Barbara Walters used to interview trees and stuff before the Academy Awards.
And she had fascinating people, that kind of thing.
Could be that she's only trying to get Trump for that.
Makeup to break up kind of stuff.
Who knows, folks?
Just my wild guess.
And it turned out my wild guess nailed it last night on the Kelly file.
Megan Kelly.
You may have heard the news today that yours truly took a trip over to Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York City.
There I had a meeting with Donald Trump.
The meeting was at my request, and Mr. Trump was gracious enough to agree to it.
We met for about an hour, just the two of us, and had a chance to clear the air.
Mr. Trump and I discussed the possibility of an interview.
And I hope we will have news to announce on that soon.
This is just, I don't know, something about this.
It's well, it's interesting.
Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Don't go there.
That's not what I'm talking about at all.
No, no, no, no, no.
Don't, don't.
Every so often, the reasons why my staff does not have their own microphone are abundantly clear.
And what just happened is one of those moments.
No, there's no, no, that's not.
I just, I'm trying to imagine myself in a situation like this, and I can't see it.
You might have seen, you might have heard that I had a meeting today.
And I just want to tell you I did.
And I went in there.
I don't know.
It's, it's.
That's just it.
I have super secret meetings.
Nobody knows about them.
That's it.
That's the whole point.
Last night on Fox News, Trump.
I'm just kidding.
Ah, slap me.
Last night on Fox News.
No, this is last night on Hannity.
Hannity had Trump on.
And it was in Pittsburgh.
Trump had a big deal in Pittsburgh.
Oh, by the way, do we have that?
Let me check something coming up here.
Do we have the Joe Paterneau?
Yeah, yeah, that's coming up next.
So they're talking about Megan Kelly.
Sean Hannity says to Trump, you met with Megan Kelly.
You met with Megan Kelly today.
How did that go?
Wait a minute.
Hold it a minute.
Recue that.
Was that audience booing?
Is that what that was?
I couldn't hear.
There were booze in there?
Oh, no kidding.
Okay, so Hannity says you met with Megan Kelly today.
How did that go?
And then there's booing?
She got booed?
Oh, here we go.
Well, you know, she called last week and they set up with me.
They said, could we come up?
And I said, would you come to Trump Tower?
Because, you know, I didn't want any confusion.
And she did.
And she was very, very nice.
And we had a meeting, and she was very nice.
Maybe she felt it was time.
And by the way, in all fairness, I give her a lot of credit for doing what she did.
Because I don't know, that took a certain amount.
By the way, let's see what happens.
Okay, so it's confirmed that she came up.
Trump wanted the meeting at Trump Tower.
He wanted it seen that she was coming to him.
He wanted it seen that she was entering his building.
He didn't want there to be any confusion about that.
What?
No, no, would you stop it?
Would you just stop it?
I'm not even thinking things.
Just stop it.
Now, here's the, this is a soundbite from Trump that has people confused.
He was in Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh is the Steelers.
And he's talking about Joe Paterno.
Joe Paterno didn't work in Pittsburgh.
Joe Paterno worked in the Happy Valley for the Nittany Lions of Penn State.
Does Trump not know this?
Here's the bite, and I will explain it.
I went to school in this state, right?
We know that, right?
This is the town of the Pittsburgh Steelers, which we love, and we do love the Pittsburgh Steelers.
It's Steel City.
And when I'm president, guess what?
Steel is coming back to Pittsburgh.
They don't have it back.
How's Joe Paterno?
Are we going to bring that back?
Right?
How about that whole?
How about that whole deal?
And we do love Penn State.
Do we love Penn State?
I mean, in all fairness.
No, no, no.
Penn State.
What happened?
Well, there was a sex abuse scandal there involving an assistant coach, a friend of Paterno's.
It was a sordid, sordid tale.
It ended up tainting Coach Paterno.
Now, what Trump is talking about here is the paterno statue that was taken down on the campus at Penn State.
He doesn't expect, there's nothing about Pittsburgh and Paterno, and Trump knows that.
By the way, Trump is a big New England Patriots fan.
He is.
Tom Brady, but he's up there with Mr. Kraft sitting in the suite now and then.
But he was in Pittsburgh yesterday, so Steelers fan.
But the paterno business, it was a statue that they took down.
And Trump is basically aligning himself with a pro-Paterno group here at Penn State and suggesting that it's time to put the statue back.
Now, he got around to the Colorado situation, party bosses, what's going on, and what he thinks of it.
In Colorado right now, they're picketing and going wild because the bosses and the establishment and the people that shouldn't have this power took all of the power away from the voters.
So the voters never got to vote.
And the voters didn't know that except when I got up and complained because they did it after I joined the race and they figured I'd probably win Colorado, which I would.
I would win Colorado.
And we had delegates.
They go in.
They don't take them.
And then they take these others.
So they get the delegates without voting.
I'm just saying the system is a corrupt system.
It's a rigg system.
We got to change it.
Well, that's the task at hand.
If you don't like the way it is, it's got to be, if you can't change it now.
And it was widely known.
I still say, why wait until it's over to start complaining about it?
Why not complain about this in February?
I mean, you've got the state chairman in Colorado out there explaining it in February.
They make the change in August.
He addresses the change in February and goes into great detail in Colorado explaining why there isn't a straw poll, why there's not an election, why there's not a poll.
They're just going to go straight delegate wine and dine, essentially.
Why not complain about it then?
I mean, you raise, you could complain about it then.
You might have been able to change it.
You might have been able to put pressure.
You might have, if you would have started complaining about this before the caucus or whatever it was took place, you might have ended up, Trump could have gone in there and maybe even won this thing.
Maybe not lost it as badly as he did.
I'm just, it's a PR question.
I don't have the answer to it, but it's something I remain curious about.
Why wait till it's over to call attention to it when there could have been a whole lot to gain by calling everybody's attention to it beforehand?
Got to take a break.
Back with more of your phone calls when we get back.
And we're back.
El Rushbo, talent on loan from God, meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
I am America's anchorman.
I am America's truth detector.
And we head back to Spokane, Washington.
Bill, great to have you on the program today.
Hello, sir.
It's an honor, Rushbo.
Thank you.
You bet, sir.
You know, sometimes with all this Colorado thing, sometimes we, the American people, need to be protected from ourselves.
You know, we have the most uninformed electorate, and they are, I can't believe it, but it's almost the same as if my 12-year-old child wanted to pilot a jet airliner that we were getting on.
I would stop him.
And I think that's what we need here, some people stepping up, trying to stop somebody who, I believe, is not ready for the presidency.
is a very, that's a dangerously elitist view to suggest that disenfranchisement of voters makes sense because the voters may be a bunch of nimrods.
That's a dangerous beginning.
Where does that stop?
I mean, I could make the case that everybody votes for a Democrat's an idiot and ought not to be allowed to because they're placing everything in great peril.
Well, yeah, you just said it, Rush.
You'd go for that, huh?
But the thing is, is that we need someone who can run this country at this time, not on emotion, but with a real knowledge of the Constitution and to get us out of it.
Okay, wait, wait a second.
Wait, wait, wait.
Hold it just a second now.
Obviously, you're speaking against Trump, but can I ask you who in either party in recent years do you think has done a good job of running the country?
Well, I'm going to have to go back to the old default Reagan because other than that, I see we've really strayed.
Well, this is the way Trump look at.
This is the way Trump supporters are looking at it.
No matter who the establishment throws up, it's just going to be more the same.
It's going to be more out-of-control spending.
It's going to be more empowerment of the federal government.
It's going to be bigger and bigger government.
It's going to be less and less freedom and liberty and less money to be made by people in the private sector.
They're tired of accepting promises.
They're tired of holding their nose and voting for the lesser of two evils.
They think they've got nothing to lose by going with somebody that you describe as a know-nothing.
Well, we have a lot to lose.
I'm a cruise supporter.
Right.
But the thing is, is that we don't just sink the ship just because we have acts to grind against.
That's just it.
They don't think they're sinking the ship.
Do you know?
Why do you think, honestly, don't detect any combativeness in my voice?
I'm just being passionate here.
I'm not, there's no contentiousness or argument in here.
Why do you think Trump supporters are supporting him?
Can you give me two or three reasons?
Is there a number one overriding reason that you think they're supporting him?
I think this is a backlash as far as in your face.
It's just a way to get back.
It's a reaction more than it is an actual thought process.
Okay.
Well, I have read the learned theories of the learned members of the commentariat in both conservative and liberal enclaves.
And there seems to be some agreement with that sentiment, which is boiled down to you basically have a bunch of people, Trump supporters, who are fed off, fed up, and totally ticked off with the fact that they kept losing and they keep losing.
And they think it's because the government's picking winners.
And so they're mad and they want to take it out on somebody.
And they're going to vote for Trump because they think that's the best way to show how mad they are at all these people ruining.
That is a pretty commonly held view of the average Trump voter.
Now, I'm here to tell you, there are a whole lot of Trump voters that I know who are not angry in that way.
They don't blame anybody.
In fact, many of the Trump voters I know are pretty successful.
They're not running around, been out of shape about that.
Most of the people that I know supporting Trump do so for two reasons.
And I'll tell you what they are when I get back.
And not one of them has anything to do with conservatism or liberalism or anything of the sort.
Okay, the two reasons, the primary two reasons I have detected people I know who are supporting Trump.
And again, there's a conventional wisdom out there, and it comes from many in conservative media.
It comes from establishment types, that the Trump voter is an idiot, a white, middle-class, lower middle class, almost in poverty, fed up, has made rotten life choices and wants to blame everybody else and is running around enraged, filled with rage, and just wants people to know how mad they are.
And that's what Trump is.
And I'm sorry, that's your average Democrat voter.
Your average Democrat voter is exactly described that way.
Somebody filled with rage, somebody wants to get even with somebody, somebody that's not, they just, they're fed up with not having their lives have any meaning, not mattering, and they're fit to be tied about it.
And they believe the Democrat Party is going to punish people for them by raising their taxes or whatever else.
And they're made happy by other people suffering.
That is not your Trump voter.
There may be some people like that.
But that's not who they are.
The vast majority of them.
And I'll just tell you that the ones I know who are for Trump, some of them are reluctantly for Trump.
Some of them are adamantly for Trump.
But the two reasons are, and one of them is going to shock you.
The first reason, and they're not in any priority here, but they just have had it with the Republican Party.
Call it the establishment or whatever.
They've just lost total confidence.
The last seven years, there has been no opposition to the things the Democrat Party has done that have wrought tremendous, real, measurable, demonstrable damage and change for the worse to this country.
The cultural depravity that's going on and being normalized is one thing.
The economic destruction, there's no economic growth.
There can't be.
The government is taking all of the growth and absorbing it.
It's getting bigger.
The private sector cannot create enough growth to keep up because it's getting smaller and smaller, and 94 million Americans in it are not even working.
So there is no GDP gain of any substance.
And that is maddening.
It is frustrating.
These people all have kids and grandkids.
And government is not where fortunes are made.
Well, see, if you're Solyndra, if you're GE, if you're a corporation engaging in corporate cronyism with government, you can make a fortune.
And even some individuals can do it.
But for the most part, the way it's always been done is the tried and true way defined as the American dream.
That's getting more and more limited as time goes on because the economy is shrinking because the government's taking this worries people tremendously.
And it's not, by the way, folks, it's not that they think Trump, I want to be very clear about this.
It's not that they think Trump is imminently qualified.
They just have had it with these so-called experts trying to run everything and screwing everything up from the economic system to the healthcare system to targeting private sector industries as the enemies of America.
They've had it.
They're fed up with it.
Not to mention immigration and what's happening to the demographic makeup of the country.
It'd be one thing if this were happening with controlled assimilation and the definitive American culture that there's always been was being maintained and sponsored and grown, but it's not.
It's being eroded on purpose and by design.
And the Republican Party's not lifting a finger to stop it.
And in fact, in many ways, wants to join in it when it comes to immigration.
So they're fed up.
They've been told one too many times to hold their nose and vote for the lesser of two evils.
And that leads into the second reason.
And the second reason is, and I think this is the one that's going to shock you, they think Donald Trump's the only guy that can beat Hillary Clinton.
They think Donald Trump, no matter what the polls say, no matter what all the learned commentary says, they don't care about all these polls that show disapproval and high negative numbers.
They think Donald Trump is the only guy who can beat Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, whoever it's going to be.
But it's likely going to be Hillary, and that's another, they don't want any part of Hillary Clinton, which leads to another thing.
When they hear elected Republicans say they would probably vote for Hillary instead of either Cruz or Trump, that's another reason why they don't want any part of the establishment.
That's why they don't want to support people who are actually outsaying that kind of thing.
The problem is the election of Democrats does not hurt Republicans living in Washington.
The election of Democrats does not harm the Republican establishment, except maybe they don't hold on to Senate committee chairmanships.
And maybe they don't run the House.
But outside of that, these teeming hordes of illegal immigrants are not living where they work.
The social and political and business cultures of Washington, D.C., and the parts of New York City where they hang around doesn't change whether Democrats or Republicans are elected.
But you get outside Washington.
You go to any state in this country, and it matters to people.
When a Democrat gets elected to the presidency, it's not good for most people, particularly most Republicans.
It isn't good.
And the last seven years are prima facie evidence of it.
So they look at the establishment and they say, well, for crying out loud, these guys, the light goes off in their head.
It doesn't matter to them when the Democrats win.
It doesn't really negatively affect their lives any.
Life still goes on for them.
But when Democrats are elected and run the White House and run the House and Senate start getting hold of all these regulatory agencies and bureaucracies start passing laws left and right, all that happens is that government grows and grows.
Freedom and liberty are becoming more and more limited.
Economic opportunity gets stifled.
They've had it.
Seven years of not even fighting back against it.
Seven years of not even opposing any of it?
Doesn't take much for somebody to come along and say he's going to fight back or whatever, or even pass himself off as a combative street fighter kind of guy.
You can throw conservatism, liberalism out.
You can throw, in terms of some of these people that I've known that are supporting Trump.
And by the way, they've got their concerns about him.
They've got, they worry doesn't know what he's doing.
They worry he doesn't know what he's talking about.
They worry he's not in depth a policy guy.
But in many cases, that's even a plus for them because they so detest they're just fed up.
Remember, these are people in their 60s, folks.
Kids and grandkids.
They're fed up.
They've had a lifetime full of, and particularly the last seven years of the most radical Democrat Party expansion that we have seen in our lives not be opposed, not be stopped, not even campaigned against in a serious way.
So the levels of frustration are reaching a maximum point.
So it's not just one reason.
Two reasons are primary, but I could just illustrate here how they are related to so many other things.
And I'm surprised by some of it, like you are.
I'm surprised that, you know, when Trump starts, when he illustrates, he doesn't know what he's talking about on a policy or some in-depth matter that most people are familiar with.
It amazes me that it doesn't matter.
But I have to keep reminding myself, that's not why he's supported.
In fact, that kind of in-depth understanding and ability to discuss policy like it's discussed in Washington is itself a negative.
It just sends the signal that it's going to be more of the same.
A lot of people, seriously, Washington needs to be rebuilt.
It's not the country that needs to be transformed.
It's Washington that needs to be transformed.
There's nothing wrong with the country other than what the Democrat Party primarily is doing to it, but the Republicans are culpable because they're not stopping it.
It's a big, big deal.
Back in a second.
America's real anchor man, doing the job that drive-by media once maybe used to do.
Here's Robin, Knoxville, Tennessee.
You're next, sir.
Great to have you with us.
Hello.
Good afternoon, Rush.
Hey.
I've had a lot of great moments in my life, and this will be right up there with those.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
I really do.
I don't want this to go by uncommented on.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
The reason I'm calling Rush is I have a little bit different take on this Colorado situation.
Two days ago, a gentleman called in, and he was irate.
was mad at you.
He was mad at the Cruz forces at Cruz for stealing the Colorado election.
And as you know, Trump has sounded the airwaves with his disgust and his dismay about how it's gone and the fact that, you know, Cruz, again, used legitimate rules to better his position.
The question I ask you from my perspective is how is any of this different than when Trump gets up and says in the past that he's used bankruptcy laws, which are on the books, to better his position in business.
People got hurt in both situations.
And I'm just saying it's the pot calling the kettle black when he gets up and complains about Cruz taking advantage of the situation.
I just feel that Cruz out-sharped him.
I see your point.
The difference, though, and I can give you a difference why it resonates with people differently.
And it's there is something sacred about the vote.
And it's only in banana republics where people are not allowed to vote.
It's only in totalitarian, authoritarian regimes where the people are not allowed to vote.
There's just something sacred and special going all the way back to Civics 101 when you were first taught about it.
And when you are told in the drive-by media that the Republicans in Colorado denied the Republicans of Colorado the right to vote.
That's all people hear.
And after that, it doesn't matter what you say.
That's cheating.
That's unfair.
That's mean.
And Trump's exploiting it.
He's exploiting it for all that it's worth.
I can't tell you.
I pointed out exactly what you did, and I even went further.
The rules of the rules.
I explained why the rules are the rules.
People were livid, but I didn't get it.
I thought I was siding with the idea of people not being able to vote.
Wasn't siding with anything.
These people who run the Republican Party can do it whenever it's not a public organization.
It's a private group that can set its own rules for how it wants to operate.
But people don't think of it that way.
So that's why I asked, why wait till it's over?
If Trump's going to try to exploit this PR-wise, he could have gained a lot more by talking about this before the outcome.
Maybe he didn't expect to lose Colorado.
Maybe he, I mean, I'm talking months ago.
You know, he's on this national roll.
He's not losing anything that counts.
And he's just winning, and he's got these polls that are showing him leading by 20 and 25 points.
And he's got these big crowds that just maybe thought he wasn't going to win it.
And maybe even if he thought he was going to lose it, it wasn't going to matter because he was going to be so far ahead.
He probably didn't see Wisconsin.
So there could be any number of explanations.
Your point is valid.
Don't misunderstand.
But from a perception and a PR standpoint, there's no way people are going to get that far into it to understand it because all they're going to see, understand is he weren't allowed to vote.
They denied them the right to vote.
And they did it because they didn't want Trump to win.
It's unfair.
It's unfair.
That's as far as it goes.
Anything after that is not going to penetrate.
Here's Dave, Columbus, Ohio.
You're next.
Great to have you, sir.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
How are you?
I'm okay.
Doing pretty well.
Good to hear.
Actually, kind of bored, but I'm not going to make a big deal of it.
Not clear to you.
I have a problem with this notion that Trump should have complained about the unfairness of this election beforehand, and now he's waived his right to complain about it.
It's too late.
Can't complain about it now.
He should have complained about it before, because then he could have done something about it.
This makes no sense.
If he did that, it would have been political suicide for any number of reasons.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
It would have been suicide to do what?
To complain about the unfairness of the election before people voted.
They weren't going to vote.
That was the whole point.
Well, I want to explain why, if I may.
Okay, but the complaint would have been people weren't going to vote.
They weren't going to be allowed to vote.
That would have been the time to complain.
Not after they go ahead and select the delegates and you've lost.
Go out and complain about it beforehand.
Get people all worked up that they're being denied the right to vote.
Put pressure on the delegates to support Trump to limit the damage in the Colorado GOP.
But they didn't decide to do that.
They decided to wait till after the fact.
Well, let's imagine that you're running for president.
I mean, I know you won't because of the pay cut.
Let's imagine you're running.
Before it's time for everybody to vote, are you really going to get up there and say, it's fixed.
The whole thing is rigged.
Your vote doesn't count.
Don't even, you're telling them, stay home, don't vote for me.
And he's also saying, I won't win.
The other thing he's doing is he's being they're going to say, like the talking heads are going to say, look what he's doing.
He's being paranoid.
He's a whiner.
He's weak.
He doesn't have any confidence that he's going to win.
He's already thrown in the towel before they even vote it.
And it's, would you vote for somebody that says don't, don't even bother.
It's all fixed and rigged to begin.
He has to wait until it actually happens, and then you can see the results.
Are you a Trumpist?
I'm a Trump supporter, yeah.
Trump supporter, yeah.
Okay, well, I was trying to figure out why you were disagreeing with me here because I was not criticizing.
I'm merely asking myself, why wait till after?
Because the point here, Dave, is there wasn't going to be a vote.
That would be the complaint.
Not that you lose, but that there isn't a vote.
People are being disenfranchised, which is what they're saying now.
Could have said it before it all happened, and it might have had some impact in the outcome.
It is the fastest three hours in meeting.
I can't believe it.
Two hours already in the can.
We've only got one to go.
And we'll be back at that before you know it.
Sit tight, my friend.
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