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Dec. 30, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:43
December 30, 2016, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Buck Sexton here in for Rush Limbaugh today on the EIB.
Thank you so much for joining.
It's open line Friday, which means that we can take lots of your calls, and we'd love to do so.
We can take them throughout the show.
800-282-2882.
Now, usually when someone's in for El Rushbow this time of year, it may seem like the most probable direction you'd go.
And we'll be a year in review, right?
We talk a bit about all let's talk about the big ideas, and we'll hit some of them from the past year.
But we don't have to do that because there's some really important news that's happening.
It seems the Obama administration is taking more action, particularly on the foreign policy front, but doing so for domestic reasons, taking more actions in the last couple of days, last 24 hours in particular, than oh, in many months before that.
I'll let you gauge just what the uh motivations of some of this might be.
It does give one a feeling that the president is leaving and uh deciding that he's just gonna pull down, he's gonna pull down some pictures on the way out.
You know, he's gonna pull down some paintings, kick some things over.
It's like the House party is done and time to throw a couple of beers in the yard before you walk out.
Making things obviously more difficult for the next administration, taking the sorts of actions that Obama always shied away from during his presidency because, well, you see, the the great genius, or so it was thought, of the Obama administration outside of U.S. shores was to do one of two things.
Either nothing or less.
You either do nothing, and then how can you possibly be criticized, or you do less, because the U.S., from the Obama point of view, from a majority of the Democrats' point of view, is a problem causer, is causative of problems, as opposed to a problem solver.
Makes more issues around the world, and therefore if you do less, you're inherently going to be on the right side of things.
Obama changed that the last 24 hours, decided to take a step away from that approach so that he could strike back.
That's the way it's being reported.
New York Times, other major newspapers across the country, New York Times here saying Obama strikes back at Russia for election hacking.
The Obama White House strikes back.
Almost sounds like a Star Wars movie.
I know there's a new one out.
I haven't seen it yet, but I hear mixed things.
And how has he struck back, you would ask, of course.
This just lasts 24 hours, everyone.
Right before the new year, right before he's handing the keys to the White House over to President elect Donald Trump and his team.
Figures that he will expel thirty-five suspected Russian intelligence operatives.
Persona non grata, PNG, kicking him out of the country.
And also imposing sanctions on Russia's two leading intelligence services.
So they have also penalized, according to the Times here, four top officers of one of those services, the powerful military intelligence unit known as the GRU.
So GRU is Russian military intelligence.
FSB is a sort of combination of MI5 from Britain and the FBI here at home.
A domestic intelligence service does more than the FBI does here.
It's an enormous service with tremendous far-reaching powers.
The Federal Naya Slozba Bezoplasnasty?
you I'm a little rusty, but that's close.
Close enough.
FSB.
Busting out some of the old CIA talk there for some of you.
Although the Russian speakers, the audience are like, poor, weak, weak attempt.
But it was close enough.
You get what I'm saying.
FSB and GRU now have some or FSB and GRU are the two leading intelligence services mentioned here in this Times piece and the GRU.
I'm assuming the FSB is the other one.
Doesn't actually specify in this Times piece.
Maybe not.
Well, anyway, uh the GRU and uh they've got these guys who are now going to be sanctioned.
I want to take a step back from the specifics of the Russia issue for a second.
If I can.
Uh I want to take a step back from it so that I can just note that these were the sorts of problems we were not supposed to have.
These were the sorts of issues that when Obama was elected, and we can look back on this now.
See, we'll do some breaking news, some new stuff, and then also, of course, the thirty thousand foot view of all this.
You see, in a world with Obama, we were promised that there was going to be no need for great power politics.
The sort of great game, if you will, stretching back to the old days with Russia and Great Britain fighting over control of land routes to South Asia, you can take this back quite a ways.
But the great game would be over and the great big hug would replace it, right?
The global campfire sing-along that would be geopolitics around the world, that would become the norm because President Obama understood stuff so well and was so adept at not just tackling the problems of foreign policy, but also harnessing the American people to his side in argument and in debate, and so we would be united at home and then united in our efforts abroad, and it would just be one big love fest.
Not the case at all, as we have seen.
Disasters across the Middle East, no advances on foreign policy anywhere in the world to point to, unless you think that giving Iran a nice clear runway to nuclear weapons in a number of years is a huge foreign policy win.
But all of this was supposed to be something that we didn't have to worry about, because the world just needed enough Obama speeches, enough lectures from senior Democrats, and the problems would disappear.
A spirit of cooperation would take over.
You see, in the first year of Obama coming to office, we didn't have geopolitical foes, we just had some countries run by some some dudes who, yeah, they could be nasty, but I mean, didn't we make them that way?
Wasn't it our fault?
Isn't that why the apology tour was necessary?
Because ultimately, if you take that leftist point of view, you can always find a US, an American basis for all the ills all over the world, at least all the big ones.
Some things, I guess, can be left to the domestic politics of other countries.
Sometimes they're responsible for their own problems.
It is tough for this administration to say that we ruined Venezuela, but I'm sure they could try.
They'd make a good a good show of it if they could.
But this has been an amazing trait of the administration to continue to this, uh, to continue this with this line, and also to constantly bully fellow Americans who disagree on policy and bow to enemies around the world who want to destroy you.
But now we get tough with Russia.
Now.
Now, right before, right before the new year, the new administration, we've had eight years of Obamaism.
We've had eight years of Obama and his top advisors in the White House trying to figure out Russia.
We had the Russia reset, we had the pivot to Asia.
We had don't do stupid stuff in the Middle East as their key organizing principle, which I think even Hillary Clinton herself had to say is not an organizing principle.
That was what they were adhering to at the time.
Failure, failure, and more failure, and now for the purposes of legacy building, and I think also at some level in the case of what's been done in the last few days with Israel, of spite.
I think there's a spitefulness to this administration, and we would be remiss if we didn't point it out if we weren't willing to talk about it.
This is what's happening now.
Destabilizing, right?
It used to be do nothing or do less.
Now it's take some pretty real, I wouldn't say uh dramatic, but take some pretty serious action on in the case of Russia, and as I'm sure you've heard, with the abstention from a UN veto from the Security Council with Israel.
We'll talk about this in some detail later on in the show.
But on Russia and Israel, Obama's made some pretty big moves.
And on and in the case uh on the case of the Russian interference in the election, that's what this is all really about.
We're told, and Democrats will constantly want to drone on and whine about how this should be a bipartisan issue, and sure, investigate this.
By the way, the Congress is already doing that, Has been doing it for months.
You'll notice that they were much less concerned about Russian hacking of the by the way, the just the term, and we shouldn't use it hacking the election.
No, no.
They hacked a couple of email accounts and leaked some emails from it in an effort to mess with the election.
This is now the uh consensus opinion, so we're told, from the intelligence community.
And there are some areas of nuance and some disagreement within that, but more or less, yeah, the Russians hacked some email accounts.
When all the polls showed Hitler winning, when it seemed like there was no way Donald Trump could win, that the Republican candidate had no shot, they weren't making too much noise about this.
Congress was looking at it.
We heard about it, it was kind of embarrassing for some administration figures.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned as DNC chair going into the, or was it right after the convention?
And yeah, sure.
We talked about it, but it wasn't an assault on the very foundation of democracy in this country, but that's what they want it to be now.
That's supposed to be the story.
And the reason for that has nothing to do with security, because by the way, stopping somebody from hacking the private email accounts of someone who's dumb enough to respond to the hey, we're the IT team.
We would like your password for your account.
If someone will respond to that with their password, guess what?
You're gonna get hacked.
So for a while it was investigate to prove whether Russia was involved.
And now we're told, okay, we we know beyond beyond a reasonable doubt, I guess you could say that the Russians were involved in hacking these email accounts, and they did so specifically to undermine our electoral process to show that America is hypocritical when it talks about corruption and uh democracy and democracy and democratizing principles abroad, and all the rest of it, all the stuff you you've you've heard.
Now Obama decides he's gonna go out there and expel thirty-five Russians.
The Russians have already said they're gonna do something.
This just broke yesterday afternoon, by the way.
Russians have said that they're going to respond, and without specifics, but in a very Russian way, you know, they've said they're gonna respond and it's gonna hurt and it's gonna be real.
Of course, part of the issue here is well, they've already been hacking, right?
They're already involved in and there's been so much hacking going on.
You look at the Office of Personnel Management, OPM, you look at the theft of secrets, both commercial and government that have have occurred in this country because of hacking in recent years.
I think that they tell us it's because if we knew the or rather, we we can't know about it for sources and methods reasons or you know, because it would complicate diplomatic relations.
I do also think there's another very real motivation for the government, and that is that if the American people found out in any real detail or were made to pay attention to the agree the government can do such things, to the scope and scale of the hacking that has been occurring, both with government uh assistance and direction and also just by private nefarious actors around the world.
People would be outraged and they would be freaked out.
But that's for years and years now.
It is only on this issue of, oh, they made Hillary lose, boo-hoo.
Trump is an illegitimate president now because we saw some weird emails from John Podesta's account.
That's when they care about cybersecurity.
That's when Obama takes action, and that's when all of a sudden national security comes into the front.
National security is an important issue for the Democrats to address before they leave power in the White House.
Bucks Exon here in for Russian Limbaugh on the EIB.
Open on Friday, so 800-282-2882.
We'll be right back.
Buck Sexton here in for Rush Limbaugh today on the EIB, 800 two eight two eight eight two.
We are in open line Friday, so let's talk.
Give me a ring, light up those lines.
We've got an update for you already to the breaking news uh from yesterday about Obama expelling thirty-five Russian uh diplomats.
The way that the Russians have responded to it so far has been twofold.
One, outright mockery, and two, uh showing that uh or trying to make it seem at least like they're above all this.
Like this is sort of petty, a little pathetic from the Obama administration.
Uh When you think about this, it should be noted, we put sanctions, uh real economic sanctions on Russia to change their policy in Ukraine, right?
This is the Obama administration working with EU partners, didn't change anything in Ukraine with Crimea.
All that's all just done.
So there were sanctions there that didn't work here.
We've got some targeted sanctions.
It's a response.
Sure.
It's something.
Will it have any impact on Russian decision making?
Well, there's some very interesting articles out right now, including from the from again the New York Times, which writes interesting stuff.
It just does it from the perspective of destroying America.
Uh and it's writing about how the Russians are trying to recruit the best hackers they possibly can.
And it's something that you would read in a spy novel, right?
That the Russian government, according to the Times, approaches hacker criminals and says, uh, you know, would you rather serve ten years in prison, or would you rather do a little hacking for us?
Um I think that very few of them say.
I have a feeling that most of them would rather do a little hacking uh for the Kremlin, do the Kremlin's bidding than spend time in a Russian prison, which I'm also guessing, without knowing, is a pretty nasty place.
Kind of a reputation for nasty prisons in Russia.
Uh but Putin says that Russia will not expel U.S. diplomats.
That's the he's taking the high road.
Look at that.
He's saying, oh, Obama can be all petty and believe this nonsense about the hacking and that it was ordered, as Obama said just in the last couple of days, that this was uh had to be done uh with the consent and direction of the highest levels of the Russian government, right?
It could only have been directed by the highest levels of the Russian government, I believe was the was the statement.
So they're not uh expelling U.S. diplomats, they say.
They're not gonna respond in kind, which actually under the circumstances is kind of how these things often go.
Right?
And this is all in that realm of diplomacy and folks down at foggy bottom have to handle the fallout in one way or the other.
Don't worry about them too much.
My favorite State Department phrase, and I love you, my former State, well, I never worked the State Department, but I used to work with some state folks on occasion when I lived in DC.
And uh there's that saying that presidents come and go, but the State Department is forever.
They'll figure it out.
It'll be fine.
Um but the other side of this, other than the high road aspect, right?
So the Russians have said they're taking the high road.
Obama is taking the sort of low approach, gutter politics here.
Uh but you see the other side of this also is mockery.
The Russian embassy, I think in the United Kingdom, put out a tweet, and oh, do I have it here?
I just want to make sure I I I can only describe the visual to you, really, because it's a very visual thing, but there's a very cute yellow duck, quack quack, with the letters lame written across it, and the Russian embassy in the United Kingdom,
from its official Twitter account, wrote out yesterday, President Obama expels 35 diplomats in Cold War deja vu, as everyone, including people uh including the American people will be glad to see the last of this hapless administration.
And then there's a cute little ducky and is lame written across it.
Lame duck.
Quack quack.
So the Russians are also making fun of.
And this is not uh this isn't some random uh a Twitter account out of nowhere.
This is actually the official account of the uh Russian embassy in the United Kingdom.
So they are having some fun at the administration's expense.
And as everyone's who's already looking at this is saying, yes, some action is is warranted, sure, but let's not let's not delude ourselves.
First of all, Obama has done nothing for years about I shouldn't say nothing, right?
And who knows?
Some of this is behind closed doors.
Let me rephrase.
Obama has not put hacking at the top of the agenda for concerns, national security and otherwise that he would address.
And now this last little bit of something, I some of it is political theater, I think you could say, is intended to what?
Show that Obama takes some action on the issue.
And more importantly, and I just want to reiterate this for the Democrats.
This uh sets more of the precedent, and it makes it more clear to people who want to take this line that Trump didn't really win the election.
That's what all this talk and all the outrage about hacking in Russia.
They don't really care about Russia and hacking and all that stuff.
And maybe they care a little bit, but it's sort of a 80-20 situation.
What really bothers them is the notion that uh her Royal Highness Hillary Clinton did not win the election, and they want to they couldn't really blame it on the FBI because you know she sort of forced that whole email thing on herself.
Couldn't really blame it on fake news because who thinks that that's changing the outcome of the election.
But can blame it on Russia.
Can definitely get away with blaming it on Russia.
So Buck Sexton and Frush Limbaugh, much more coming.
Indeed, Buck Sexton here in for Rush on the EIB, day before New Year's.
Great time to be on the radio.
Thank you so much for joining.
It is open line Friday, 800-282-2882.
Joined by my buddy now, uh John Schindler.
He is formerly of the National Security Agency.
He is currently a national security columnist for the New York Observer.
You can read his latest on Observer.com.
Obama finally wakes up to join the spy war at the 11th hour.
Mr. John Schindler, great to have you, sir.
Great to be here as always, Buck.
So not a particularly robust response from Obama, but a response.
What do you think?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, look, I I'm not going to say I'm unhappy to see this.
Of course I'm happy to see this.
I just wish this had happened years ago.
It is impossible to uh avoid the obvious conclusion that Obama only got serious about Russian espionage and unpleasantness related to it when they went after Democrats.
We've been through years of uh nasty Russian clandestine games with Snowden with wiki leaks causing real damage to our national security, and Obama's dropped the ball repeatedly, and he's basically putting some sort of fig leaf gestures to show he means business as he's packing up the Oval Office.
So make of that what you will.
Now there's usually uh uh sort of an ebb and flow, uh a back and forth to this uh dance of spies, the measures and countermeasures that are up applied here have a have a long-standing history, stretching back to the Cold War era, whether it was the United Kingdom, as you point out in your piece and the Soviet Union or or the U.S. and uh making individuals PNG persona non grata, uh this is the way that we respond when there's some sort of a diplomatic or espionage related incident.
Uh this is something this is a usual way things go.
Putin, however, is saying, no, I'm not going to be petty like that.
Uh is this just sort of a recognition that he has uh he has other means and has been deploying, as you pointed out, other means of irritating, undermining, and harming U.S. interests.
He doesn't need to talk about it.
Well, this this is classic Putin.
I mean, Putin's playing playing a really great, great game here.
He says we're not going to retaliate, we're bigger than that.
Oh, and by the way, I want to invite the families of American diplomats in Moscow to the Kremlin's Christmas party.
Uh, I mean, d this is vintage Putin.
Uh as you said, he has plenty of ways to harm the United States.
They've lost about a third of their undercover uh officers in the U.S. posting as diplomats with this latest Obama action, throwing 35 of them out of the country, said PNG being declared persona non grata.
Uh the Russians would normally retaliate.
Putin's showing he's bigger than this.
And the two facilities, by the way, John, I didn't really get into that.
But tell us about a a bit about these two facilities that were shut down, or at least what's what's known uh in the press about it.
Yeah, these were uh these were long-standing diplomatic compounds, kind of resort compounds.
One of them is outside New York City, uh, really big one is on the eastern shore of Maryland.
The State Department on the White House's orders is shutting them down unceremoniously.
They're being uh rapidly evacuated as we speak.
Uh these were spy bases used to collect signals intelligence against American targets.
The one in Eastern Shore of Maryland was particularly bad for us because it collected a lot of information about the Pentagon uh and the National Security Agency.
So I mean, that's gonna hurt the Russians.
But I I I gotta tell you, the Russians have known this is coming for a long time.
The temperature has been rising on this for years, ever since Snowden showed up in Moscow back in June of 2013.
The spy war's been getting ever hotter.
The Russians have been going harder and harder on us.
They had to know this kind of thing was coming.
So any any setback on both the shutdown of these resort spy bases or the expelling of thirty-five Russian spies, that's a short-term pain thing for the Russians.
They probably had standing plans in action to compensate immediately.
And I think those of us who pay uh pay attention to these matters uh are have to chuckle a little bit, although it's also uh uh somewhat unnerving.
When there's all this discussion now about uh Russian active measures, active measures has now become a term that people in the media who had never heard it until a month ago are throwing around.
Obviously, those of us who work in the intelligence community have been quite familiar with it for a long time.
Uh but that but that uh there have been propaganda campaigns, active measures deployed in this country by the Russians or by others.
I mean, Snowden is you just mentioned a minute ago.
Snowden is uh embraced as a sort of hero of the left in this country, despite the fact that he's really just an old school defector at this point.
He's an old school defector who's cosied up to the descendants of the KGB.
That's all he is.
And I I let me throw out here, I'm disappointed we have some people on kind of the hard right who have said nice things about Snowden too.
Unfortunately, it's not just the sort of loony left that thinks Snowden is a hero.
You know, we when we have people appearing on Fox News, you know, sort of having green gr taking the Gren Glenn Greenwald line on this, I get concerned.
This is not what conservatives are supposed to be doing.
Um, you know, well, no matter how you think about Obama, and I I'm certainly no fan, he's gonna cease being president in less than a month, and the government goes on and the country goes on, and our national security goes on.
So let's do that.
Well, this is clearly turned into a battlefield over the legitimacy of the election in a and and th that overshadows the very real discussion about Russian hacking, which is not new, Russian active measures not new, all the things that have been going on for years, up to and including uh shenanigans during the election.
The fact of the matter is, though, the newfound interest is that the Democrats seem to have in this, and certainly that the White House has, uh, is directly tied to the narrative that they helped well w they can't prove it, but they want to keep it out there that that the Russians, that the Kremlin helped Trump win.
That's what this really boils down to.
In terms of the interest level, I know there's facts below it that are worthy of discussion.
Well, the good news for the Republicans is Democrats and Liberals are of course taking this way too far.
Uh Russian they call it hacking, it's really just signals intelligence, purloining of democratic emails happened.
This is a fact.
They weaponized it using WikiLeaks.
This is a fact.
Republicans need to stop lying about this.
But they did not hack our election in any sense whatsoever.
There's no evidence for that because that is not what happens.
There were guys named Sergey and Oleg taking paper ballots and shredding them in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania.
It's comical.
It's comical.
And let's talk about the real issue.
We need a fully bipartisan multi-committee congressional investigation of what happened so it doesn't happen again.
But it needs on both sides to be reality-based.
And the Liberals are doing what they normally do.
They have they have a good hand and they're going way too far and going into hysterics about it.
So that's the good news.
The bad news for our coming in President Trump is a lot of Republicans on Capitol Hill, which the GOP seemed to be controlling both houses, of course, are are really unnerved by what Russia has done, and they're no liberals.
And so this has to be addressed.
This issue is not going to go away.
And the more that Trump and his surrogates sort of pretend nothing happened, the more damaging it's going to be to them.
And it doesn't have to be.
All they have to do is come out and say, look, Russia didn't give us the election, but we understand some things happened that were bad and illegal and shouldn't be allowed to happen again.
Let's resolve this.
And in that spirit move forward.
But you see, John, you h you you hit on it right there.
If they wanted to make it about national security and dealing with a Russia that understands this sort of the these new forms, and they're not new as in we've just discovered them, but relatively new on the battlefield, uh forms of warfare involving cyber and and these uh the these different ac activities the Russians have been involved in now for for years.
If they would just say, look, we Trump is right when he says we need to move beyond this with regard to the election.
But they won't say that.
The Democrats won't say that because they want to keep that alive as an issue for the entirety of any investigation and discussion and anything.
Russian hacking now has to be synonymous with and Russia gave Trump the election.
They won't make that initial break because then the political then there's no political juice to squeeze out of this.
Yeah, and I gotta tell you, I'm not convinced that the Putin really wanted to elect Trump.
I think he wanted to create incredible chaos in the United States.
And that, let's be clear, he has certainly done.
And unfortunately, everyone's playing into that right now.
And that's why we need to step back and and say, look, you know, the election happened, it's done.
Stop trying to delegitimize Trump, whatever you think of him.
And of course, there are plenty of Republicans who are not wild about Trump either.
Let's focus on the real national security issue, because if we don't, Putin is going to keep stoking these problems and making DC even more ungovernable than it already is, and Lord knows it's plenty ungovernable now.
So it it is in our national security interest to take this seriously on all sides.
And unfortunately that's just not happening yet.
I do think there's this important piece in the New York Times about how active Russia is right now in trying to gather together cyber army, I mean th cyber armies essentially.
They're looking for talent anywhere and everywhere, including hackers that are doing some really malicious stuff.
They've got a great pitch for them.
You want to you want to rot away in a Russian prison, you know, in and who knows where?
Or do you want to work for us and have a nice sort of comfy state uh state appointed uh uh apartment for yourself?
Uh the Russians understand that this is where it's all going, right?
It's it's not gonna be tanks information squaring off against each other, but the cyber battlefield is just going to keep expanding.
Well, and unfortunately, this is the classic case where we have a lot of advantages over Russia in the cyber domain.
You know, we've got Silicon Valley, the National Security Agency is the best in the world at what they do despite Snowden and all the security problems they have.
But we're losing to the Russians in in a cyber campaign because we just don't take it seriously, and we we don't push it hard enough, and we're not recruiting necessarily all the talent we need, and it's not getting political backing at all from this White House, and it's taking them years to finally admit that there's a serious problem here.
Uh and I wish I could say I'm optimistic about President Trump.
I'd really like to be, but until he admits that there's a problem here, and and not just for the Democrats, it's a nationwide cybersecurity problem.
I'm not convinced we're gonna get a whole lot better.
And we really need to because the Russians are stealing our lunch, and they shouldn't be.
We're naturally better at this than they are.
Russian general uh Jirazimov published his Jurazimov Doctrine and talks about cyber as part of nonlinear war.
If this is in fact a nonlinear war, if we're gonna classify it as such, clearly just expelling some diplomats is not sufficient.
What is what is the future?
What should the Trump administration coming into office do vis a vis Russia to try to curtail, defend against, or perhaps retr uh retaliate uh in response to that?
I mean, we certainly have the option of retaliation, not as much as we'd like, because Russia, of course, doesn't have a free media, the internet is somewhat controlled in their country.
It's not a good thing.
They're like hack our elections.
We've already hacked them.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And I mean, we certainly have all kinds of bad information, what the Russians call compromat, compromise materials on Putin and his whole higher up uh structure in the Kremlin that they're all crooks, they're making billions of dollars illegally off the backs of the Russian people.
We know this, Western intelligence knows this.
That could always be leaked through certain third parties.
Um and that that would be you know hardball and getting in the game.
But I I mean we have to think then the Russians can go even worse.
I I think the the upside to Trump having these strangely cozy ties with Moscow, and I'm trying to find them, is that we that may give us the possibility of his administration saying directly to Putin, you guys just have to cut this out.
You know, if if we're gonna get along, yeah, we understand you're gonna collect information.
In that sense, the hacking is still gonna go on because we did the same thing to Russia, make no mistake.
And lots of countries do.
Yeah, it's what we're doing.
For this to get better, unless people want things to get really hot and really nasty.
We are gonna need somebody who has some respect when it comes to Putin.
I mean, has some of Putin's respect and is able to sort of look him in the eye and and try to and Yeah, I mean, part of this is that Putin has overt contempt for Obama and his administration.
It's really, really intense.
And once Obama's on the White House, it could get better.
At least possible it's possible, and I certainly hope that it does, because the damage this does to our national security and our economy uh is is really awful, and it we need to get serious about this.
And it's not just about cybersecurity in a hardware software sense, it's also getting used to the fact that putting all of our information online, which our governments do, businesses do, American individuals do, renders serious vulnerabilities to all of us in 2022.
Inherently, inherently vulnerable, and everyone needs to understand that.
John Schindler, formerly the NSA, currently national security columnist for the New York Observer, read his latest at observer.com.
John, great to have you as always.
Thanks for joining.
Thank you.
Bucks X and In for Rush, we're gonna take some calls.
Open line Friday, 800 282-2882.
We'll be right back.
Buck Sexton here in for Rush Limbo on the EIB.
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We're gonna take some calls here.
800-282-2882, Stacy in Indiana.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
What's up?
Hi, Buck.
Hey, uh, I'll get straight to it.
Um I agree with you about the uh when Hillary was winning, it was no big deal.
I mean, they've known about this, they knew about the hack for months before the election.
And outwardly to us normal people, it didn't seem like they did anything about it.
And then all of a sudden she loses, and now it's this big deal.
Well, Stacy, don't you have to we have to ask the question, right?
If what happens if Russia the Russian interference thing, we know people say they hack the RNC.
I know there's been all this back and forth on that, but Russian interference in election, one way or the other.
If the Democrats win, well, you can argue that then the other side gets to make this case, right?
About, well, what else did Russia do?
And were they influencing things and fake news?
So when they were sure Hillary was gonna win, they were pretty quiet about it.
Yes, yes, and they and you're right.
If it if you the I don't think the other case would go that way, though.
Is they if they if it was flip-flopped, I think it'd be a non-issue.
No, because Republicans don't always expect to get a trophy.
So, you know, we know we've lived under eight years of Obama.
We know what it's like to not have your policies enacted at the uh at the government level.
So uh we we we've gotten pretty good at at the whole stiff upper lip thing.
Um nonetheless, uh Stacy, I appreciate you calling in from Indiana.
Uh Elizabeth, down here in Florida, where I'm actually doing the show.
I'm in Palm Beach, lovely down here.
Elizabeth, what's up?
Well, shields high, Buck.
Great to hear you.
Thank you.
Um, just want to say also happy belated birthday to you.
Oh, wow.
And um you know, this whole thing about the Russians, it just it makes you crazy.
Uh Hillary didn't lose because of the Russians.
She lost because of her own illegal actions.
Oh, totally.
She's a horrible candidate.
I mean, uh the Russians didn't make Hillary's unlikable numbers sky high.
The Russians didn't make Hillary lie repeatedly over and over about her email server.
The Russians didn't make it clear to anyone reading the newspapers and paying attention that the FBI stepped in front of the DOJ and the attorney general in order to deflect the criticism of the politicizing of that investigation.
I mean, the the Russians didn't do any of that.
If they did, I'd have to tip my hat to them for some pretty amazing active measures.
They got a couple of embarrassing emails from Podesta and Debbie Washam and Schultz and a few, you know, Clinton types.
Who cares?
That's for sure.
It was interesting, but I don't think anybody I don't think anybody who was worried about their job paying their mortgage or the future of this country is like, well, now that I know that people complain that Chelsea Clinton's a brat, I really can vote Democrat.
I just doubt it.
I mean, you know, call you can call me crazy.
Well, and we'll always remember Obama's legacy as the great deceiver, divider, and terrorist supporter.
Oh, wow.
I'll leave it at that.
Elizabeth from Fort Lauderdale uh Fort Lauderdale, great to have you.
Thank you for calling in on the EIB.
Um I think actually I'm gonna roll into a break here.
800-282-2882, open line Friday continues on.
Uh if you want to know more about me, you can go to the Blaze.com slash Buck Sexton.
Uh, you can also learn about the Buck Sexton show there.
And I'm Buck, so I'll be right back.
Buck Sexton in for Rush today on the EIB open line Friday, so that means we can take lots of calls.
We hope to do so.
800 28282.
Two big things the Obama administration's done the last week or so.
Do major moves on the foreign policy front, geopolitics, but of course, with tremendously important roots for the Obama administration in domestic policy and public opinion here in this country.
This is about the Democratic Party, this is about the American left, this is about the legacy of the Obama administration.
We talked in the last hour about Russia in some detail.
You even heard me bust out some bad Russian as somebody who's never actually learned a word of Russian in a classroom, which was apparent from my pronunciation.
Nonetheless.
The Russia exp or the expulsion of Russian diplomats and the sanctioning of Russian intelligence agencies.
That just happened last 24 hours.
But you still have unfolding now the uh ramifications And the continued turmoil, uh, all the dust that's been kicked up here, still up in the air from what the Obama administration did, or really, in a sense, uh, didn't do, depends on how you want to uh discuss it or how you want to uh uh phrase it, by abstaining from a veto of a UN Security Council resolution condemning uh Israeli settlement building.
And also making no distinction, by the way, and we'll and we'll get into some of these details between, for example, Israelis living in Jerusalem and those living in what are called, quote, outposts, which are different than settlements.
And uh there's the detail here matters, the discussion matters, but importantly, I want to point out that this is all about Obama telling us what he really thinks of Israel.
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