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July 19, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:42
July 19, 2016, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of The Rush 247 Podcast.
All right.
Look, folks, I don't want to make things about me.
I never ever try to make them about me.
But sometimes sharing personal anecdotes is a way to convey an opinion.
Now you know, in case you ever wondered, why I do not listen to other people on the radio.
I never have, because I don't want to inadvertently hear something I think is clever and then inadvertently use it, and then inadvertently be accused of copying something.
So I don't listen to it.
And it's why I don't watch a lot of television anymore.
It's why I don't watch a lot of opinion stuff.
There's so much out there, and there are so many people just waiting to tell you that you stole whatever you said from them.
That's why, you know, my my news gathering is on my own, and I don't pay much attention to what is spoken on radio and TV.
I do I do a lot of reading, but um this this is why don't I I have no idea I have no doubt that one of two things happen when with the Melania Trump.
Either this was a planned act of sabotage, and you can take that and run with it as far as you that's a that's an easy cop out excuse.
Or somebody, this is what happens when you try to go moderate.
This is what happens when you when you when you try to tone things down, you look at the way other people have done it successfully.
If you're a speech writer, I'm talking about, if you're if you're on the staff putting all this stuff for this convention together, it comes time to write Melania's.
English is not her first language.
It's no-brainer that she's gonna be uh given some assistance in writing the speech.
And she's gonna rehearse it and so forth.
And so you start if you're one of the speech writers, if you're on that staff, there's no doubt you consult.
It's just it's an unfortunate thing when you when you get right down to it.
Um that somebody lifted a portion of a speech delivered by Muchell Obama.
I don't know if it was laziness, I don't know if this was a setup to embarrass uh Melania.
I don't know if this was designed to create what it has created.
You aside from this, you you would never you'd think nothing else happened at a convention last night.
except this.
Washington Post's GOP's despicable first night of the Republican National Convention.
Folks, I'm gonna tell you something.
Despite what the drive bys are writing about, they're scared to death.
They are scared to death at this convention because they've not dealt with anything like it before.
Uh and it's it's to them new territory.
They don't like Trump to begin with, they don't like the Trump campaign, they don't like the fact this is outside the insider rules of the game.
They don't like this outside the the playbook and the manual for how to do conventions and how to do campaigns.
So here, listen to this.
Stephen Stomberg writing at the uh at the Washington Post, the evening took an early dip into the gutter.
You anybody watching this last night think any aspect of it was in the gutter compared to what we see from the Democrat Party every damn day.
The Democrat Party's policy agenda has taken this country into the gutter.
That's what we're all trying to climb out of for crying out loud.
We are surrounded by sewage and waste and detritus or detritus, however you wish to pronounce it.
We're surrounded by debris.
This country's been taken so low that when you look up the gutter is what you see.
Nevertheless, Washington Post, the evening took an early dip into the gutter when Republicans trotted out Patricia Smith, a grieving mother of a man who died in the Benghazi attacks, who practically accused Hillary Clinton of murdering her child.
Quote, for all of this loss, for all of this grief, for all of this cynicism.
The tragedy in Benghazi has wrought upon America.
I blame Hillary Clinton.
I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son.
Close quote, and the story continues.
Multiple investigations suggest different Conclusions, but few of the presentations Monday night were substantive.
The uh the fact that Patricia Smith seemed to be on the verge of tears conveyed the desired pathos.
Her grief stricken anger is understandable.
That's the acknowledgement here that the woman is a genuine human being, and that's as far as they're gonna go with the post.
You know, her grief's understandable, and her pain is understandable, and she's a fine American, but the Republicans gutter like decision to exploit her grief to execute a cheap attack on Hillary Clinton is not.
Yet Patricia Smith turned out to be just the first in a series of victims willing to blame their tragedies on Clinton.
You mean this is not like exploiting a portal filmmaker and putting a guy who had nothing to do with anything in jail?
You want to talk about exploiting victims.
The Democrats parade victims of every imaginable tragedy up to every congressional hearing that they've ever had.
And they do it time and again.
They use Hollywood actresses to tell us about the woes of farm life.
They're constantly parading, and they're constantly blaming everything that's gone wrong in this country on the Republicans, from racism to sexism to bigotry to homophobia, and it's never said to be in the gutter.
This it just it it it's just it ticks me off because it's so unbalanced, it's so unfair, it is so biased, so compromised, but it's there's real anger in this piece, and it stems from the fact that they don't like what is going on.
They want a scripted Republican convention run by a bunch of people who know how to lose the upcoming election.
And that's not what's going on here.
Let me find it.
You know, this there's still uh there's still here it is.
Solely on the left, they're dependent on what Nate Silver says about the campaign.
The 538 blog, this Wonderkin that analyzes polls and then um reports candidates' percentage chances to win an election.
Get this headline.
And the left left is supposedly comforted by this.
Election update Clinton's lead as safe as Carrie's was in 2004.
This is a piece saying, don't worry, Hillary's okay.
Didn't Kerry lose in 2004?
And a lot of polling over the last few days in advance of the RNC, which got underway Monday in Cleveland, mostly confirmed the conclusion of our election forecast models that had arrived at late last week.
Hillary Clinton leads the Trumpster by three or four points.
That's down from a lead of six or seven points a few weeks ago.
Trump's odds have improved.
He's a 36% chance of winning.
38% chance according to polls plus, but Clinton remains ahead of Trump in the clear majority of polls.
And her lead is as safe as Carrie's was in 2004.
By the way, did you know Black Lives Matter claims that Pokemon Go is racist?
Have you heard this one?
Yeah, an AP fact check, no proof of shooting motive is Trump claims.
This is uh Baton Rouge.
This is it's just incredible.
Look at the news today.
It just it's incredible.
On Monday, Donald Trump suggested a shooter in the latest police killing in Bath Rouge, Louisiana on Sunday was motivated by radical Islam.
Trump's comment Monday during an interview on Fox and Friends got out far ahead of what law enforcement and security authorities have said.
Early indications are he had no known ties to any radical Islamic group.
And then they quote Trump, what he said, and then they follow that with what they call the facts, which are the motive of shooter black marine veteran Gavin Long, not yet known, although comments and videos he's posted online shed some light on his thinking.
Really?
Think.
What is this?
The motive of shooter, black marine veteran Gavin Long, not black nation of Islam member.
Yeah, Black Lives Matter claims that Pokemon Go Is inherently racist.
You know why?
Don't laugh, folks.
This this is from the Santa Cruz, sorry, the Santa Monica observer.
Big newspaper out left.
Yeah, privileged white people play Pokemon Go.
That's number one.
Privileged white people then create their avatars.
And Black Lives Matter says most of the avatars created by the privileged white people playing Pokemon Go are blue eyed.
So privileged white people run blue-eyed avatars through their neighborhoods, knowing the police won't shoot them.
As they search for their Pokemon's.
So it's inherently racist.
Black lives matter.
Anyway, back to um back to Melania Trump.
You know what I think they ought to do?
If they want to try to do damage control, they ought to offer her to Brian Williams.
What could he possibly say to her?
I mean, they suspended the guy for a year, right?
For uh lying, making things up.
Uh I don't know if there's plagiarism in all of that, but he almost lost his.
Well, he did lose the gig of the NBC Nightly News, and he's now over to MSNB.
He says, put it, put her over there.
And you know, call Neil, well, Neil Kennick passed away.
Uh, but Biden's been accused of plagiarizing him.
And Obama's been accused of plagiarism.
You know, are you aware of that?
Plagiarism.
Obama's been accused.
You've forgotten that story.
I'll remind you of that as the program unfolds.
And the drive-by's all upset over Trump's entrance last night, looking like coming from the WWE with the silhouette and the fog.
And I guess they've forgotten Obama's plastic fake Greek columns.
At the Denver convention.
I'll tell you what, a lot of people think that this thing was planned sabotage.
The reason they think that is because here's essentially a non-issue.
And it takes what was a really, really good night, was a really really good opening night for the campaign and turns it into what they want it to be portrayed as is a chaotic disaster like this.
Washington Post story.
Anyone who watched the speeches last night saw the police honored, saw the military honored over and over again.
Anybody this last night finally had a Republican event, finally saw Obama and Hillary exposed as dangerous liars and security threats.
Finally, a Republican event where Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were properly attacked and categorized.
Well, when a naturally the drive-bys can't highlight that.
No, no, no, no, no.
We can't talk about that.
So we got to talk about Benghazi, Patricia Smith, and Melania Trump and her plagiarism of Michelle Obama.
So instead of reporting what happened, the media presents soap opera storylines to deceive and to distract.
But despite it all, despite the media's 24-7 Trump bashing, despite all of the media shielding of Hillary Clinton, the latest NBC news poll, shows Trump and Hillary in a virtual tie.
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump virtually tied in the polls as the Republican National Convention convenes in Cleveland this week.
Clinton now just barely edges out Trump in a direct head-to-head matchup, 46 to 45, at slightly down from the three-point lead she held in last week's tracking poll numbers.
So they they've been thinking that last week I told you they thought it was over last week.
They thought hey, they thought it was over in June.
Remember that?
Couple days or three days where the media narrative was that presidential campaigns are actually won or lost in June.
You remember that?
We highlighted that because that's when they thought Trump was really screwing up badly.
Trump tell you Hillary was running all this paid advertising.
Talk about Trump being unfit, unprepared, temperamentally Unready, all this stuff.
Well, Trump was out there complaining about the Mexican judge, not talking about Hillary and the FBI investigation.
The files, a blown opportunity.
Everybody said, that's it.
I mean, she's got 11 points here, four points over there.
She's gonna just steamroll ahead of the guy.
Didn't happen.
The gap has been closed.
Conventional wisdom continues to explode in the drive-by's faces each and every day.
It's like we're handing them IEDs, and they're opening up and saying, hmm, hmm, what's this?
A new poll showing Hillary and a landscape blows right up in their face.
And it probably will continue to do so because they don't understand.
A lot of people, even uh professionals on the Republican side, don't understand how to handicap, report whatever the uh Trump campaign, including the Republican National Convention, New York Times.
Rancor reigns.
This bitterly divided Republicans begin their convention.
You know what this is about?
This is about the attempt of the never Trumpers to change the rules and prevent ballots on the first of the delegates in the first ballot to um vote their conscience and not have to follow the results of the primary in their states.
I have people there, folks.
They can't get anything past me this week.
I'm not there, but I got people I trust there.
And this was much ado about nothing.
The cameras focused on a bunch of loud voices, but it wasn't rancorous.
It lasted a half hour.
It never had any chance of going anywhere, and it was just a bunch of people getting things off their chest.
But now the upshot of that is that the true the Ted Cruz contingent, all the cruise delegates, they're planning to walk out Thursday.
Have you heard that?
You haven't heard that.
The cruise delegates planning to walk out on Thursday before Trump's uh acceptance speech.
But look, uh we have more on all this.
Um I'm gonna have a general review of the night from my unique perspective, including more on Melania and the ostensible plagiarism.
Rudy Giuliani, Mike Flynn, uh.
The I thought the speech by uh I'm having a middle block on the uh the special forces guy that that wrote the book about his unit being killed in Afghanistan.
I'm I'm having a middle block of this.
He was great.
Um he was Marcus Luttrell.
He was, I I thought this is as real as you're gonna get, as as as unscripted and as genuine as you're gonna get at uh at a political convention.
So let me take a brief time out here, folks.
We're gonna be mixing your phone calls in with all this.
There's other news despite what happened in Cleveland at the uh Republican convention.
And I I have not had a chance to review the audio soundbite roster.
I I'm gonna have to look and see.
Malik Zulu Shabazz was on Fox last night with Megan Kelly.
She destroyed him.
I gotta see if we have that.
It was about time to back in just a second.
Okay, grab audio soundbite number one.
I'm gonna take you back to me on this program May 5.
May 5th on this program.
I warned everybody of exactly what's happening today.
When Hillary Clinton is threatened by a female, then the media and her allies hop to.
They get into gear and do whatever they can to take out the opposing female.
My experience with wives of conservatives and wives of Republicans and the Democrat Party in the media is that usually there are exceptions, but usually the media and the Democrats will do everything they can to diminish the wife, to diminish the woman.
They will imply that she is brain dead, or that she's a gold digger, or that she is stupid and dumb And is just following around as arm candy, and whatever accomplishments any Republican or conservative uh candidate's wife has will be ignored.
Or even worse, they'll do stories that say she wouldn't have had anything if it weren't for her husband.
Her husband set her up.
They will do everything they can to diminish.
They do.
I mean, it's nothing new.
Look at, and it's quite the opposite with Democrat wives.
In fact, what I just said that they will do to Republican wives is exactly what Hillary Clinton has done.
She has attached herself to a man, followed him around everywhere, and tried to take over at various stages.
But they don't show them any respect.
Very little whatsoever.
It's all part of the demeaning and destroying campaign of the candidate is what it's about.
And sometimes not just candidates.
Any effective conservative person's wife is fair game in the drive-by media.
We're seeing a little bit of that now.
Okay, folks, I'm gonna go to the phones early because I know a lot of you want to weigh in.
So we're gonna start Castlebury, Florida.
This is Maria, and it's uh it's great to have you here.
Thank you.
Uh well, I'll just go right to it.
What uh Trump's wife said yesterday was beautiful.
I don't care if it was a duplicate of what Michelle said, because when it came out of Michelle's mouth, it was all a lie.
Now, coming out of Trump's wife, it's truth.
So what people are saying, if if it was mimic or not, I don't care.
She's a beautiful woman, and what she said came out beautifully.
And that's all I need to say.
Well, now wait, let me ask you uh uh a question, because you said something interesting.
You you said when it came out of Michelle's mouth, you didn't think it was genuine.
When you because whatever she said is a lie, because nothing that any any of them both have said is true.
They're liars.
Obama and his wife, Michelle.
They're both liars.
Okay, but but look, I'm I'm just I'm not trying to foment anything here.
I just want to uh ask you specifically.
Plagiarism, that's what the media, they're not they're not commenting on credibility, uh accuracy, honesty.
They're saying that Melania stole passages from a speech by Michelle Obama, and they're using that to say, oh, Michelle must have been great.
It must be a movement so good that the only thing that Trump people could do was try to lift it.
And now the media, the media effort is to totally distract everybody from everything uplifting happened last night, get them focused on the fact that there was theft on that stage last night.
And I don't think so, because a lot of the speeches that a lot of people, presidents, first wife, or whatever I mean, it they're normally a lot very, very similar.
They're almost duplicated.
You know, I don't care how many first wives, how many presidents, but when you really look, they all kind of say the same thing.
You know, and all I could say is whatever came out of her mouth last night, Trump's wife, I loved it.
I loved it.
And what the media is doing, they're gonna continue doing this.
Of course.
You're exactly right about that.
And it's not gonna get better, folks.
It isn't going to change.
Go through this every year.
And there's always a contingent of people who get depressed and down in the dumps because the media doesn't start promoting our side, and they think that until that happens, we're never going to win anything, which of course isn't true.
It is hard to deal with.
It is hard.
I I I know before anybody learned of this plagiarism.
By the way, if it wa I'm not denying that that it looks very close, but how is it that only one or two media people happen to remember that Michelle Obama ever said those words?
Was your first reaction, for example, snurly, you've you watched this stuff, you pay attention to this stuff 24-7.
Did you think when Melania Trump uttered those words?
I've heard that somewhere before.
You didn't?
Did you, Brian?
Now you're watching the British Open Replay.
You thought it was great.
Um, I I it didn't it didn't it didn't hit me either.
I I thought I thought she was charming.
I thought I thought she was she was great.
I've sat next to her at a dinner.
I don't know her either.
I mean, I'm I I know her, but I don't know her.
I've I've been around her A couple of times.
Would never be able to lay claim to being a friend or any of that.
But I'm telling you, she's no nonsense.
She is aware, and she is uh highly attuned to circumstances and situations, and she's uh she's no wallflower.
She is uh I uh my my impression, you know, after uh conversation with her was that she doesn't suffer fools.
Very gladly, and she's uh she's smart and so forth and knows exactly what she thinks.
Not arm candy or any of this sort of thing.
Now it it does appear, we've got the audio here, we could do side by side comparisons.
I will.
It's coming up here, just a second.
It it does appear she took a few lines from a speech that my butt gave in um the ah gee.
Oh gee.
Um that Michelle Obama gave, what was it in 2008.
But I I think the contrast here is interesting.
I mean, they're out there charging plagiarism and copycat and so forth.
But here's Melania Trump, who immigrated here from Slovenia.
She worked hard.
She followed the precepts of the American dream and was rewarded when she talks about the concept of hard work and the American dream.
I it had credibility.
I believed it.
I think that's something she has firsthand experience with.
I wouldn't, I don't think Obama and Michelle even believe in it.
I think they give it lip service, because they know they have to, because it's such a fundamental fixture of American life, but I think they look down on that like they look down on all the other institutions and traditions of this country.
I think I think they think it's a fool's game.
I think this American dream business is in their world.
That's a fool's game.
Only fools fall for that.
What it means to them is, yeah, you work hard, you work hard for the man.
You're working for the boss, and you never get paid fairly, and you're discriminated against all the time, and there's nothing fair about it and all this.
And I I think they have resentment for it, but they can't ever say that.
And I conclude this based on what they say about other things and how they talk about this country in general.
I mean, Michelle, the concept of hard work, Michelle had a no-show job at some hospital in Chicago after her husband became senator, state senator there.
Some people do work very hard and long to achieve it, and they only see it realized in the next generation.
Some people get by on their special class to advance.
Some people advance based on their grievances, some people advance based on minority status.
Some people advance.
Let's just put it this way.
A lot of people advance in ways that have nothing to do with merit, and the American dream is rooted in merit.
And there's all kinds of people.
All kinds of people have connections, all kinds of people have the have the uh the skids greased for them.
But most people don't.
Most people don't.
If if if you come from a family of connections and prominence, more power to you.
But most people don't.
And they have to work for it, and thus they know what it is.
So I I it's hard for me to ratchet up feelings that are negative or rooted in anger at Melania.
I f I really do feel sorry that this happened because I I think I have enough of an understanding of how events like this get put together that somebody either purposely or inadvertently and and maybe unintentionally, just it just happened, uh, lifted some.
When you're putting speeches like this together, people do consult previous speeches.
That's why I don't listen to anybody else.
It's but I just I just don't.
It's It's too easy.
It's too easy to hear something that, wow, man, that is really smart.
I'm gonna find my own way of saying that.
It's a trap.
And I've never, I've never listened to other people on the radio for this exact reason.
I have watched people on television, but I tell you, it's it's uh it's an ongoing constant awareness.
And with so much talk, so much commentary out there.
Do you realize how difficult it is to be unique?
Well, you know, back in the old days, when there were just three networks, there were three Sunday shows, there were three nightly newscasts, and only two of them did commentary.
Well, only two of them did commentary, supposedly.
The whole newscast was commentary, just nobody knew it.
But ABC had a commentator and CBS had Eric Sebaride.
And that was where they said, probably took a break from the reporting of the hard news of the day to learned analysis from senior correspondents who had traveled the world and seen all kinds of suffering and were therefore qualified to tell us what we just thought meant.
And then there were slowly and surely we had programs like the McLaughlin group came up.
Come on, and it then became a destination for all these columnists and opinion.
You know what happened?
Tell you what happened.
The television people have always been resented by the print people.
It's true in news, it's true in sports.
The reason is money.
The TV people have always out earned by a factor of 25 in some cases, what people in print earn.
And it just graded on the print people, the ink stained wretches, they've always thought of themselves as the real journalists.
They're out there beating the path.
They're using shoe leather, they're tracking down sources and leads, and the TV guys are getting makeup and hairspray.
If somebody's writing what's going to appear on their prompter, and they look good in the tie isn't a perfect Shelby not make it out there, and they've got their TV wife or TV husband that's equally made up as well.
Look like they're going to a cocktail party and they're reading the news and they're getting paid ten times what the print guys who created the news, and they just they just couldn't stand it.
So the TV guys were smart.
They started hiring the print guys to come on as commentators.
So the print guys were converted to TV guy.
They kept their print jobs, became TV commentators, started earning the big bucks, and they they the same thing happened in uh in sports.
That's why you watch an ESPN sports documentary, every expert commentating on whatever the subject is, is a writer from the Newark Star Ledger or the Poughkeepsie beaten path or whatever it happens to be.
That's how the TV guys made peace with the print guys and uh got rid of that enemy type existence.
And now everybody's a commentator.
And it's just it's hard to come up with things that uh other people don't think and don't say.
So when you're writing a speech for somebody, you will consult other speeches that have been successful, and depending on your proclivities, you'll either lift it and try to get away with it, or you'll change it enough and try to adapt it to whoever.
I'm not making any excuses here.
Please don't misunderstand.
I'm just explaining how these kind of things can happen.
I don't, the point is that Melania Trump is not a thief.
And I I don't I don't think that was at all what happened here.
Let me take another brief time out, my friends.
You hang in, they'll be coming back in mere moments to.
Okay, now I'm gonna I'm gonna play some of the side-by-side Melania and Michelle Obama soundbite, so you can judge for yourself, but I'm gonna tell you something else here.
There's there's another reason why the drive-bys are hyping on this or harping on this, and that is so they don't have to give any attention to Rudy's speech.
And so they don't have to give any speech to share any time to share off Clark's speech out of Milwaukee.
There were some great moments last night, and the drive-bys have their excuse to ignore them.
With the Melania Trump plagiarism controversy.
Uh and it'd be easy to fall into the trap.
I half my soundbite uh roster contents here are related to plagiarism.
And this, I guess I'm looking at the roster.
This is what always happens.
Something like this, when it happens, the drive by's focus on it.
We get in gear and think, okay, we got to defend this.
We can't let them get away with this.
Once again, they set the agenda, we start defending, and in the process of defending, we go back and we find examples of all the Democrats who plagiarized.
We get Biden plagiarizing Neil Kennock.
I've got a couple of sound bites of Obama plagiarizing people.
If I used all these sound bites, I wouldn't get to Rudy Giuliani or Sheriff Clark until halfway through this program if I chose to go with them first.
And that's the objective.
The drive-by's, in fact, uh NBC pulled out of Rudy's.
The moment Rudy started talking about Hillary last night, NBC canceled their coverage and went to their round table discussion of their commentators telling everybody what they were seeing and what they had seen.
And this is done on purpose as well.
So we have highlights from Rudy's speech.
Uh trick us into giving up the totality of this program to their agenda, which is the Trump campaign cheats.
The Trump campaign is a thief.
The Trump campaign stole the best material of the night from the existing first lady.
Oh, there's so much wrapped up in this, that gives them every reason and excuse in the world to ignore what happened.
If you didn't know better, you would think two things happened in the convention last night.
You'd think three.
You would think that there was such rancor over the rules that the party almost ripped itself apart at four or five o'clock in the afternoon, and the convention almost didn't happen.
Then you would learn that one of the mothers of a person killed in Benghazi just very unfairly in low class, just really blamed it on Hillary Clinton.
It was gutter like, and it was horrible, and it was rotten.
And then the third thing you would know is that Trump's wife stole her speech from Michelle Obama.
And if you watch ABC CBS NBC, New York Times, Washington Post, that's what you think the Republican convention was last night.
That's it.
You don't know about the Sheriff Milwaukee.
You don't know about well, you might you might hear him say that Rudy was just unusually animated last night, was really, really overboard in his caustic comment on Hillary, but they won't be using many highlights of Rudy's speech.
This is uh Ed in San Antonio.
Hey Ed, great to have you with us.
Hello, sir.
Hi, Rush.
I'll get right to it here.
I've been uh frustrated with the leadership of the RNC for the last ten or fifteen years.
It seems like they're always one step behind uh the topics of the day, and they they let the uh the Democrats uh identify what's going on rather than uh and of course they feed that to the to the drive-by media or the media too,
but uh they don't ever stand up and and and get the truth out on a timely basis, uh frustrated with uh the fact that McConnell made a deal with the devil uh so that his reelection he wouldn't be opposed by anybody uh strong.
The fact that uh was just a seat polisher, he really didn't take the lead in anything.
And that the vote yesterday on the floor wasn't necessarily about walking out on Trump.
It was trying to get the rules in place to get the RNC brought up the speed and get the good old boys out and some people who know what they're doing.
Yeah.
Uh well uh whatever it bombed out.
It didn't work, and it was not nearly the rancor that everybody was trying to make it out to be.
Back here in just a second.
Fastest three hours in media.
Okay, here's what we're gonna do.
We come back, we're gonna do side by side Michelle Obama and Melania Trump, and not listen just for the content, but other things.
I will coach you, I will advise you as we get into this.
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