June 10, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:24
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| Time | Text |
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| Buck Sexton here in For Rush on the EIB. | |
| We got Open Line Friday going on, of course. | |
| Thank you so much for giving me some of your time today. | |
| It is always an honor and a pleasure to get to hang out with you here on the EI to the B. There's a story that I have to hat to the Daily Caller here for bringing this to our attention. | |
| Let me take a step back for a second. | |
| Earlier in the week, there was quite a brouhaha. | |
| I think that's a term that would apply here. | |
| A dust-up, if you will. | |
| Yeah, a dust-up. | |
| We like that one, too. | |
| There was a melee. | |
| I can go. | |
| I can go all day, sir. | |
| Yes, there was a kerfuffle. | |
| There was all kinds of stuff happening because of Donald Trump's comment about Judge Curio. | |
| And you had Paul Ryan. | |
| You had Paul Ryan with the whole like, you know, that's racist. | |
| I mean, I stole him going to back Trump, but it was a racist thing to say. | |
| I was like, whoa, okay. | |
| So that happened. | |
| And of course, the underlying premise there was that Trump said, and then there was, of course, these sort of insinuations around it, but that a judge of Mexican heritage could not be trusted to be fair to somebody who's so well known and, | |
| you know, right now as a candidate for the presidency, has pretty much a 50-50 shot of, well, I'm not saying statistically, but it's him or it's Hillary, can't be trusted to rule on a case involving Trump because of his view of building a wall on immigration and because of this judges, associations, and whatever. | |
| Say about that what you will. | |
| I don't even have to try to relitigate that or walk down that path again. | |
| That is not a place where I particularly want to take us right now. | |
| I do want to point something out, though. | |
| And this is, again, as I said, comes courtesy of the Daily Caller. | |
| Because we have been told that this was all we needed of just what a complete racist Donald Trump is. | |
| And as I said to you earlier in the week, and I think has been apparent for quite some time, it doesn't matter what Trump says. | |
| I mean, Trump could just walk around offering everybody free hugs and saying that he wants to pass out, you know, candy canes and Hershey's kisses and just loves America. | |
| And they're still going to call him a racist and a sexist and say he's the worst and that we're ready for Hillary. | |
| Doesn't matter what he says. | |
| They'll find a way to call him a racist. | |
| So let's all just start from that. | |
| Start from that premise whenever you hear going forward more about how Donald Trump is a racist and everything else. | |
| With that said, it's so interesting to me that if you look at this issue and you say, well, has the Obama, well, how does the Obama administration act on this? | |
| And has there ever been a case in recent history? | |
| Forget about even for a moment that the racial makeup of juries is a constant issue for back and forth in a courtroom. | |
| And everyone knows. | |
| And that people have said that an all-white jury can't be trusted to give justice to a minority. | |
| And you can switch around how this works. | |
| And just you mix and match and you decide whether you think that this is fair or not. | |
| This is what's been happening across the country for some time, right? | |
| People have been fighting over this issue to see what is justice. | |
| And it's a good discussion, a good debate for everyone to be having. | |
| The Obama administration took a very interesting position on this, though. | |
| And this is NPR reporting pointed, that the Daily Caller has pointed out here, that there was a case of an immigration judge, Judge Ashley Tabador, who had been hearing immigration cases for quite a while. | |
| And she met with some immigration judges. | |
| I'm sorry, she met with some Iranian leaders at the, or what was the, I'm trying to make sure, Iranian American community leaders, pardon me, Iranian American community leaders, and she was told that she could do this, but then she would have to recuse herself from any future immigration cases dealing with Iranians. | |
| And she turned around and said that this was discriminatory. | |
| DOJ's position on this at the time was that she had to recuse herself because of this. | |
| So here you have a judge who meets with people who are Iranian American leaders at the White House. | |
| And of course, as you know, Iranian American leaders in this country tend to be very anti-Iranian regime and opposed to the mullahs and all the rest of it. | |
| But she met with these leaders, and then she was told by the Department of Justice that, in fact, she should have to recuse herself because she couldn't be trusted, or I shouldn't say couldn't be trusted, but there was an appearance of possible impropriety based upon her ethnicity and connection to a group that is specifically advocating the interests of that ethnic group. | |
| That was the Department of Justice's position. | |
| And as I look at this, I just say to myself, so, okay, this was something that happened before. | |
| And I will point out that the DOJ did end up settling. | |
| And I think they gave her, what do we have here? | |
| Tabador's attorneys announced the Department of Justice agreed to, and this was just back in 2015, everybody. | |
| And this is NPR reporting. | |
| I'm not going through the file cabinets of the right-wing express over here or something. | |
| I'm not looking around the basement of some blogger trying to find forged documents about Hillary from the right-wing conspiracy. | |
| This is from NPR, that back in 2015, Judge Tabador was, the Justice Department lifted its order. | |
| They forcibly told her, you can't hear these cases. | |
| She thought it was going to be up to her to recuse herself. | |
| They had to review their recusal policies and pay her $200,000. | |
| Now, you might say to me, well, Buck, doesn't this prove that you shouldn't take somebody off a case just because of a member? | |
| It's a combination. | |
| It's not just somebody's ethnicity we're talking about in this case or their national origin. | |
| I know people go, oh, it's not ethnicity. | |
| It's race or it's not race. | |
| It's ethnicity or it's nationality. | |
| Okay, whatever. | |
| Someone's background in one way or another that she did win this case. | |
| And essentially, DOJ admitted fault in all of this. | |
| But the whole point here earlier the week was that just the mere suggestion that Trump, in his capacity, actually as a private citizen going through the Trump University lawsuit would have some problem with a judge was viewed as just beyond the pale. | |
| Look, you had leadership of the GOP saying this is outrageous racism. | |
| And look, the way he said it wasn't, as I said, it wasn't a good way to say it. | |
| But the DOJ says if you're an Iranian American, oh, sorry, I skipped a point here. | |
| So it's your background, ethnicity, and activism tied to that, right? | |
| That's sort of another step in addition to. | |
| So as I was saying, it's one thing to say you're a Polish-American, and somebody say you're a Polish-American who's part of the Polish-American Advancement Front or something. | |
| And then you're sitting on cases about whether we're going to increase Polish American or Polish immigration into America, right? | |
| That's a sort of similar or a similar storyline here, I think. | |
| And the Department of Justice, and my understanding is this was under the Obama administration as well. | |
| It doesn't even matter, though, even the fact that the Department of Justice under any administration took this position. | |
| The DOJ, okay, our highest legal authority, well, other than the Supreme Court, but you know what I mean, the court system and then the DOJ, they decided that they would recuse this lawyer, I mean, this judge, based on her background and her connection to an ethnic, ethnic interest group of some kind or another, or having met with an ethnic interest group. | |
| That's it. | |
| So is it really the most racist thing anyone's ever heard? | |
| Because this was the day. | |
| Is it really just because, well, she was Iranian and in the hierarchy of ethnic victimology in this country, Iranians are very low on this scale, and so we don't care as much. | |
| What's the principle here that separates the two? | |
| Why is it that the DOJ could make that? | |
| Look, I know they said there was fault in it, but is the DOJ just, you know, a year ago, the DOJ was wildly racist. | |
| We just didn't know about it, I guess. | |
| No, that was their official ruling in this instance. | |
| And yes, it was overturned, but to pretend like it's just so outside the pale and the most crazy thing ever said, okay, well, all of a sudden you make it about Iranians and Iranian-American, and not only is it something that's discussed, but our Department of Justice takes basically the Trump line that, you know, you can have some associations with an ethnic or national origin advancement group or whatever, and that can affect your ability to give a fair ruling. | |
| I mean, what am I missing? | |
| I think this is, I think this should at least factor into our perception as to how much of a vile transgression it was, what Trump said earlier on in the week. | |
| And look, he walked it back a little bit. | |
| I saw the statement. | |
| Well, I mean, it's a Trump version of a walkback, which is really more of a, I don't know, it's kind of a Trump sort of, it's more of a moonwalk. | |
| Yeah, it's like not really, you know, he's still Trump even when he's walking backwards. | |
| So it's a little different. | |
| But nonetheless, I just think that this is an important case to give context to the kinds of discussions we can have over justices and judges and the legal system. | |
| Instead of just accepting that, look, it's going to be a really long election cycle if everyone's just pointing fingers all the time and saying, oh my gosh, so everything is so racist. | |
| Everything's so racist. | |
| In fact, part of what I think really gets a lot of Trump supporters fired up is somebody who doesn't go into the corner and cry every time there's an accusation of racism made against him because it is just the cheapest, most obvious trick the Democrats pull over and over again, nonstop, and we're all sick of it. | |
| And it's not just if you're a politician. | |
| It's filtered down into the broader society. | |
| Nothing's allowed to be funny anymore. | |
| Everyone's afraid of losing their job. | |
| Everyone's afraid of being called a bigot, whether it's for being racist or transphobic or any number of things. | |
| It's just there's a revulsion now. | |
| There's a revolt against the tyrannical regime of political correctness that has gone to unforeseen levels, unforeseeable levels now, even from five or ten years ago. | |
| It's more pervasive now. | |
| It's more vindictive now. | |
| It's not enough to make someone apologize. | |
| Now they apologize and still get fired and are still unhireable afterwards because they really want to make examples of people. | |
| So, look, if every time the media hears something they don't like and they scream racism, everyone goes, oh, gosh, oh, I'm so terrified. | |
| I don't want to be associated with that. | |
| Well, they're going to get their way, and it's just going to get worse, and it's going to continue on. | |
| And the incoherence of the left on a whole host of issues is going to get even crazier and crazier and have government power behind it as well. | |
| 800-282-2882, Buck Sexton here, InforRush, Facebook.com/slash BuckSexton. | |
| If you can't call but want to let me know what you think, back in a few. | |
| Buck Sexton here, InforRush, 800-282-2882. | |
| They have unleashed many of the surrogates, surrogates of the Clinton campaign to go after Trump, of course, now. | |
| And Elizabeth Warren decided that she was going to really get a little bit nasty. | |
| Play what she had to say about Mr. Trump. | |
| What kind of a man is Donald Trump? | |
| Donald Trump says Judge Curiel should be ashamed of himself. | |
| No, Donald, you should be ashamed of yourself. | |
| Shame. | |
| Ashamed for using the megaphone of a presidential campaign to attack a judge's character and integrity simply because you think you have some God-given right to steal people's money and get away with it. | |
| You shame yourself and you shame this great country. | |
| Elizabeth Warren pulling out the rhetorical tomahawk there. | |
| Really getting kind of rough with the Donald. | |
| The good news for those of you who want Trump to win is that both Hillary and Warren have all the warmth and charm of a Siberian prison guard. | |
| So it's not really going to get them very far. | |
| I think, at least on a charisma and personality basis, they're not going to be able to do all that much. | |
| But the machinery is fully behind them. | |
| That's what's going on there. | |
| Let's take a few calls. | |
| We have Bill in Georgia. | |
| You're on the Rush Limbaugh show, sir. | |
| You're speaking to Buck. | |
| Hi, Buck. | |
| Nice to chat with you. | |
| You feeling okay? | |
| Yeah, I can hear you okay. | |
| Yes, sir. | |
| Great. | |
| The initial reason for my call was I just don't understand why everybody's so against Trump. | |
| They call him a fascist. | |
| They call him all these names on what evidence. | |
| But beyond that, what also bothers me is: why does everybody walk around calling Democrat Party members Democrats? | |
| They're obviously not Democratic. | |
| They're authoritarian, as can be proved by the superdelegate thing. | |
| Yeah, well, look, Trump is not a fat. | |
| I mean, Trump is, well, I do not believe at all. | |
| When people start talking about Trump being a fascist, I mean, I have Otherwise, seemingly rational and sensible people asking me if I'm really afraid that Trump is going to turn into like an American Hitler. | |
| And I look at them like, really? | |
| I mean, you know, are you really asking me that? | |
| I mean, this is a businessman from New York. | |
| I don't get it. | |
| I mean, I agree that the venom, I can understand people that think that he's a phony, that he's a fraud, and that he's not going to do the things he says he's going to do. | |
| I understand the case that those people make, those who make that, and they have a lot of evidence that they can point to. | |
| However, there's a difference between that and he's just going to like nuke countries like some sort of psychopath and become a fascist and shut down a free press and put people mass incarceration. | |
| I don't know, whatever. | |
| I mean, the stuff that people say about Trump has kind of gone well beyond the pale. | |
| And what was the second part you said? | |
| Was it about Clinton? | |
| I forget now. | |
| Oh, the Democrats. | |
| Oh, all the Democrats. | |
| Yeah, they're authoritarians, but that's the way that that's the way that they are. | |
| I mean, look, there was an American Communist Party. | |
| There was a socialist movement in this country for many decades, and people go, oh, it just, if you read the history books, it just disappeared. | |
| No, it actually just merged into the Democrat Party. | |
| So it's not surprising that it has sort of re-emerged now or sort of popped up on the surface with Bernie Sanders as a Democrat socialist getting a lot of support from Democrats and giving Hillary a real run for her money. | |
| And we know how much Hillary likes money. | |
| So, you know, she's running fast. | |
| All right, Bill, thanks for calling in. | |
| Good to talk to you. | |
| Yeah, I just, I don't know. | |
| Do we have time for? | |
| No, we don't. | |
| I can't get to a call right now, but I'll get into some stuff. | |
| I kind of want to talk about Hillary's, well, actually, forget about Hillary, but the Obama administration, of which Hillary was a part, and the mistakes that they've made on the world stage, more specifically Afghanistan and what's going on there now. | |
| There's some news out today about that that I wanted to hit, but we'll have to put a pin in that for a moment. | |
| By the way, a quick note before we go into break here: Never Hillary, never Hillary, never Hillary. | |
| We all agree on that. | |
| Well, official Never Hillary bumper stickers are available now with a free subscription to Rush 24-7. | |
| You also get it when you give a gift subscription. | |
| So if you still need a Father's Day gift, go to rushlimbaugh.com right now and get your free Never Hillary bumper sticker and all the other benefits of a Rush 24-7 member, the Ditto Cam Podcast Archives, and more. | |
| Never Hillary bumper sticker. | |
| I've already got mine. | |
| They're awesome. | |
| They go with any decor, any outfit, never, ever, Hillary. | |
| Rushlimbaugh.com on that one. | |
| All right. | |
| That's one thing I wanted to get out there. | |
| Well, I still could. | |
| And I just realized now we actually could have gone to a caller because we had another minute, which I math is not my math is not my strong suit. | |
| No, I want to talk about Afghanistan a little bit. | |
| So if that's something that interests you, you might want to get in on the lines now. | |
| We've got a space for one or two. | |
| They're going to be opening up the rules of engagement a little bit because, well, that war is not. | |
| We're still at war there, despite what the Democrats seem to want us all to believe, and despite the way that the Obama administration seems to spend more time trying to define the parameters of that mission than to define what the objective of that mission is actually. | |
| So we'll get into that a little bit. | |
| A bit of a national security deep dive coming up your way. | |
| And I also want to talk to you a bit more about immigration. | |
| And if I have the time, we might even discuss a valedictorian from Texas who was talking about how she's in illegal, heading to Yale, and gave a speech that got a lot of attention. | |
| So basically, a whole bunch of topics coming your way. | |
| Buck Sexton here in for Rush. | |
| I got a lot more. | |
| Don't go anywhere. | |
| Buck Sexton here in for Rush. | |
| You can download my daily podcast Monday through Friday at theblaze.com/slash Buck Sexton. | |
| You also maybe see me pop up on CNN talking about some of these things as well. | |
| That guy that you see on there would be me, so that's always fun. | |
| And you can let me know what you think about today's show or just let me know what you think in general at facebook.com/slash Buck Sexton. | |
| I want to talk to you about Afghanistan a little bit. | |
| It is in the news today because, well, one, we are still at war there, and we still have our soldiers, we still have our military in harm's way, and the media seems to have lost a lot of interest in these things under the Obama presidency, or at least they've reframed the discussion about these things under an Obama presidency. | |
| And the latest here is that Obama has decided to roll back the restrictions that he began last year on U.S. support to what we call the ANSF, Afghan National Security Forces, that he roll back support to them in the form of airstrikes, right? | |
| That they were going to be sort of in the lead doing the fighting. | |
| Now, this has been going on for 15 years. | |
| We've been trying to build durable Afghan institutions, specifically an Afghan military that can actually defeat the Taliban on its own or at least hold them at bay. | |
| And that effort, well, it hasn't been successful yet. | |
| And the Obama administration, I think, you can give it credit for at least learning one lesson over its now eight years, and that is after the disastrous withdrawal from Iraq, which then led to the Islamic State taking over parts of Syria, parts of Iraq, the largest jihadist army consolidated and on the march in the post-9-11 era, really in the post-Taliban era, you could say, or post-Taliban 9-11 era. | |
| And there's a sense that, well, at least they were able to figure out that if they withdrew U.S. troops wholesale from Afghanistan, which was the Obama administration's policy, keep in mind, or that was their promise, I should say, a promise they even made at the very outset of the surge. | |
| And the promise was that U.S. troops would all come home. | |
| Obama was going to end wars. | |
| It is something that I think will be inescapable for his presidential legacy. | |
| There'll be interesting ways they try to write the histories to make this seem like less of a failure than it is, because I know many will take that option. | |
| But he's ended wars in neither country. | |
| We have troops. | |
| We have U.S. military in Iraq. | |
| We have U.S. military in Afghanistan. | |
| And both of those countries are in worse shape now than they were when Obama took office. | |
| Both of them, certainly Iraq. | |
| I mean, unquestionably, and I would make the case as well in Afghanistan. | |
| So Obama's decided to allow for more airstrikes. | |
| If it can give a, there's sort of some lawyerly language in the actual, in the actual, if it can give a strategic gain, is the quote on the battlefield against the Taliban, according to the Wall Street Journal here, then they can call in for an airstrike. | |
| This is because the Taliban is taking back more ground. | |
| We're in the midst of the fighting season there. | |
| There was a brief moment a few weeks ago. | |
| Some of you will recall when Mullah Mansour, who was the individual who took over the leadership of the Taliban after Mullah Omar died. | |
| Mullah Omar died two years ago, and there was not a whole lot of difference in Taliban operations and activity as a result of that. | |
| We didn't even, at least it wasn't publicly known for two years that Mullah Omar had died of other non-combat causes. | |
| Then Mullah Mansour took over, and then the Obama administration announced that they had fired a missile into his car, killing him and another occupant, another Taliban guy. | |
| And their official press release, this was just a few weeks ago, the official press release for 24 hours was, well, now we think we have a, and now we think this is a milestone and this is an opening for peace talks. | |
| And I remember I was actually over at CNN when this happened, and I had to take a moment to just take a beat to think about: are they really, this is really what the administration puts out there now to try to create the perception that they actually know what they're doing and they have a plan? | |
| That you blow a guy up in his car who's the leader of a terrorist organization and you think that the guy who takes over is going to be more willing to negotiate. | |
| He's going to be the more peaceable or the more peacefully inclined one. | |
| I said that that seemed like very faulty logic at the time. | |
| And since then, by the way, all reports from the Taliban are in support of that the new guy is, in fact, in some ways more of a hardliner than the old one. | |
| You know, here's the new boss, same as the old boss. | |
| This boss actually might be worse. | |
| And while we've been told that the administration has been making gains on this front and they have some idea of what it is they're going to what they're going to do, Akhanzada, by the way, is the name of the new Taliban leader, Mullah Haybatvilla Akhanzada. | |
| He was a Sharia judge, known for being particularly strict, by the way, under Taliban rule. | |
| So we're already talking about Taliban rule where people are being executed and having one of the ways they would do stoning was actually to knock over an old wall on top of somebody and all these horrible, horrific punishments, amputations, executions. | |
| If you were known as like a particularly scary guy as a Sharia judge and a military tribunal judge then, you must be one crazy dude. | |
| And Akhanzada seems to certainly fall into that category. | |
| He's the new leader. | |
| I tell you all this because the Obama administration is slow to expand on these U.S. military airstrikes in Afghanistan because they don't want to upset the peace process. | |
| And you might take a moment and say, well, what's the peace process supposed to be? | |
| The negotiations that we've been hoping will bear fruit between the Afghan national government based in Kabul and the Taliban. | |
| We think there's going to be a peaceful negotiated settlement here. | |
| What it really is, is the hope, which is in vain, certainly for this administration, it's not going to happen by the end of this year, so it won't happen while Obama's still in office. | |
| But what the Democrats had been hoping was that they could get a negotiated peace of some kind. | |
| They're still hoping this with the Taliban. | |
| And then we can sort of pull out and just say, all right, we're out of here. | |
| And then whatever happens isn't our fault because we achieved peace and we're all done. | |
| The notion that the Taliban would keep its word and would adhere to any agreement, if it wasn't a matter, you know, you would have a hard time keeping a straight face with it if it wasn't a matter of life and death and war. | |
| It's absolutely preposterous. | |
| You know, there are a few phrases that everybody knows very well from the conflict in Afghanistan. | |
| Among the best known is the Taliban quote, which I believe is actually attributed to Mullah Omar, although I think it might be one of those. | |
| That might be an apocryphal attribution. | |
| It could just be something that's said over there. | |
| But the Taliban says that we have all the clocks, but they have all the time. | |
| They recognize that the longer they wait this whole thing out, the longer they try to wear us down and wear down the Afghan government, which is incapable of providing the security and the services necessary to win over the people in a counterinsurgency situation, | |
| the more likely it is at some point that they'll be able to, once again, go from being shadow governors to just straight-up governors to establishing statelits or sort of mini emirates in provinces like Heleman and Kandahar and elsewhere in Afghanistan, and from there consolidate and with Pashtun, Pashtun tribal elders and such joining because they don't, you know, it's join or die. | |
| So people will join who hadn't even necessarily been Taliban beforehand. | |
| They will march on Kabul and we'll be right back where we were in the 90s. | |
| And oh, by the way, the new Taliban that will come to power in this future that I'm talking about now, which I think is maybe a couple of years away, maybe sooner, maybe a little longer. | |
| But the new Taliban will also play host to al-Qaeda, all sorts of jihadist elements, because that's just, you know, once you understand the nature of a thing, you have a very good idea of what it's capable of and what it's going to do. | |
| And the Taliban, of course, hasn't changed its ideology one bit. | |
| We often refer to it as a it's referred to as a nationalist insurgency to separate it out from al-Qaeda, which is a sort of global jihadist terrorist entity. | |
| But they were symbiotic organisms pre-9-11. | |
| They worked together hand in hand, as you know. | |
| And there's no reason to believe that that wouldn't happen again in the future, especially under the premise of what are we going to do? | |
| We're going to invade again. | |
| So it's just a question of time for them. | |
| And the administration thinks that by loosening up some of the rules of engagement, they will just forestall collapse. | |
| They will forestall, for example, the seizure of a major city in Afghanistan, which happened earlier or happened last year, a matter of months ago, when they took Kunduz in the north. | |
| And usually northern Afghanistan is thought of as being, it is traditionally safer because it's not Pashtun ethnic majority Pashtun territory. | |
| And so it tends to be a place where you have a less robust Taliban presence. | |
| So when you seize a major city in northern Afghanistan like that, if you're the Taliban, it sends quite a message. | |
| And then we had, and there was a series of reports that came out about what went on there with U.S. military special forces as they were trying to help the Afghans, Afghan military, Afghan national police, take back that city. | |
| And at each phase, it was kind of just, well, do what you got to do to take it back. | |
| And they're saying, well, what is that? | |
| So are we, and sure enough, U.S. troops, we're taking it. | |
| We're the ones doing the fighting and at the tip of the spear trying to take it back. | |
| But no, no, if you listen to the official press releases, we're in an advise and assist capacity there. | |
| Our role in Afghanistan is to just sort of be there to train and cheer on the Afghans to defeat the Taliban. | |
| Even the Obama administration knows that's not going to work. | |
| That's not going to fly. | |
| And so we're going to be flying more airstrikes. | |
| And just give it some time. | |
| We're also going to have more special forces and others who already are on the front lines, much more than is reported. | |
| But they'll be in ground combat operations in increasing numbers because this whole thing is, this whole thing's going south on us, everybody, in a big way. | |
| The media doesn't want to talk about it because, oh, that's right. | |
| The Obama administration, national security. | |
| Who was a part of that whole thing? | |
| Oh, that's right. | |
| Hillary Clinton. | |
| She was Secretary of State. | |
| Wasn't she working with our partners in countries like this? | |
| And wasn't that whole Libya thing? | |
| Oh, there's a lot we could talk about. | |
| Maybe we'll get into more of that later. | |
| 800-282-2882, Buck Sexton here in for Rush Limbaugh. | |
| Much more coming. | |
| Be right back. | |
| Buck Sexton here in for Rush Limbaugh. | |
| 800-282-2882. | |
| Having a good time here on the EIB, as always. | |
| Let's take a call from Susan in Ohio. | |
| Susan, you're on the Rush Limbaugh show. | |
| You are speaking to Buck. | |
| Hi, Buck. | |
| Thanks so much for taking my call. | |
| Question for you. | |
| As you are an expert or seem to be on Afghanistan and our policies there, I've always thought it a very strange coincidence that so much of the world's heroin is produced in Afghanistan. | |
| And right now, especially during the Obama administration, we've had quite an upsurge in heroin consumption. | |
| Acts absolutely an epidemic where I live and throughout the U.S. I wondered if that was anything short of coincidence or if there's any relationships there. | |
| Also, so much of heroin seems to be shipped out of Chicago, which is our leader's starting point. | |
| Okay, yeah, so you're asking about heroin. | |
| There have been times when I've read estimates in the press and else in different reports about how 90% of opium cultivation in the world occurs in South Asia, specifically Afghanistan, southern Afghanistan along the Pakistan border and into Pakistan as well. | |
| But much of that, and that has been a major source of funding for the Taliban now for a number of years. | |
| Correct. | |
| Much of that, and this was, I mean, during my time in Afghanistan, this was a huge concern because you have on the one hand, you know, U.S. sort of federal law and federal policy is eradicate poppy. | |
| On the other hand, okay, but that's how farmers in areas that we're hoping will be pacified and will come over to our side, make a living for their families. | |
| And if you destroy, if you do sort of, you know, crop spraying and such, or burn down the fields, now they go, okay, well, I can't feed my family. | |
| I'm just going to join the Taliban and start planning IEDs. | |
| It's a very complicated part of the counterinsurgency piece here and something that I was dealing with and very aware of when I was in Afghanistan. | |
| Okay. | |
| But actually, some of the heroin that we see in this country is, or more of it, more and more of it, is grown in Mexico. | |
| It's brought in by the cartels and grown in Mexico. | |
| That's been part of this as well. | |
| They've been growing gardens there. | |
| So Mexico has been increasing heroin production to feed demand in this country because it is quite a ways from Afghanistan to here. | |
| A lot of the heroin trade out of Afghanistan, or you know, the poppy trade and then turned into heroin and moved in bricks and such out of Afghanistan tended to make its way sort of through former, you know, sort of the former Soviet states route and into Europe. | |
| And then from Europe, of course, it could make it into the U.S. And look, it's all a question of logistics and how expensive and difficult they make it. | |
| But it's a lot easier to grow heroin in Mexico and take it across the border. | |
| And we're increasingly seeing that because of the demand here. | |
| And the cartels realize, okay, there's high demand for heroin. | |
| Let's just grow it and let's grow it ourselves, right? | |
| So that's something they've been doing. | |
| Thank you. | |
| All right. | |
| I was happy to help. | |
| Mexico, this is from the LA Times. | |
| Mexico's Attorney General's Office said that authorities destroyed 30,000 acres of poppy crops in the first half of 20, this is a little old, but I just pulled up a stat here. | |
| That was from 2014. | |
| That's a lot. | |
| 30,000 acres of heroin, or basically heroin fields, poppy fields, but that's how you make heroin. | |
| That's happened right across the border, actually. | |
| So perhaps this is also a decent point where I'll say that we will take a segue into, in the next hour, talk about some border issues. | |
| I think that would be an interesting place to go with this. | |
| Immigration, always a fun topic for Open Line Fridays, I am sure. | |
| 800-282-2882, Buck Sexton here, InforRush on the EIB. | |
| I'll be right back. | |
| Buck Sexton here in for Rush Limbaugh today. | |
| Open Line Friday continues. | |
| But as a side note, please do download my podcast Monday through Friday. | |
| It is available on iTunes, SoundCloud, or Stitcher. | |
| Just type in Buck Sexton in the search field. | |
| You can subscribe. | |
| It is free. | |
| It is fun. | |
| We do all kinds of good stuff. | |
| A lot of national security, actually, on the Buck Sexton Show. | |
| So if that interests you, I would highly recommend you check it out. | |
| Bringing some of my old agency background to play, some of the old knowledge of how those sorts of things work around the world. | |
| All right. | |
| Scott in Oklahoma. | |
| You are on the Rush Limbaugh show. | |
| You're speaking to Buck. | |
| Made it, Buck. | |
| Yes, sir. | |
| You too. | |
| Let me get to my point. | |
| And you can tell me whether I'm wrong on this or not. | |
| You had a caller in the previous hour that said, well, at least Trump isn't a criminal, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And what I was wondering is, isn't Donald Trump due for a pending fraud case for Trump University? | |
| Yeah, but that's a civil case, not a criminal case. | |
| So he's not a criminal. | |
| Even if he were to get annihilated and lose that whole class action, he wouldn't be a criminal. | |
| He'd just be somebody who lost a civil judgment. | |
| Well, still, it's kind of a lapse in judgment. | |
| It's kind of a lapse in morality, don't you think? | |
| I mean, if he's found guilty, I mean, I also will be honest with you, I haven't really care as much about the Trump University case. | |
| And I'm not somebody who defends everything that Trump does and says, but I don't care as much as some other people seem to. | |
| You know, the guy, they were selling a product. | |
| They used sales tactics. | |
| Some people were happy with it. | |
| Some people weren't. | |
| I mean, you know, if you buy a sham wow, maybe it works. | |
| Maybe it doesn't. | |
| I don't know what to tell you. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, understand, I'm not a big fan of Hillary. | |
| Like, I've been, like you, a conservative since I could spell the word. | |
| But one of the things that I've got to think about. | |
| You've got about 10 seconds, so we're going to have to speed this up, unfortunately. | |
| We're innocent until proven guilty. | |
| Yeah, we are innocent until proven guilty. | |
| That is true. | |
| But unfortunately, I'm 58. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I got to go. | |
| I got to thank you for calling in, though. | |
| I'm out of time. | |
| But hour three is coming up, and it's going to be awesome. |
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