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Aug. 17, 2021 - Sean Hannity Show
30:22
Gingrich: Biden's Blunders
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This is an iHeart Podcast.
All right, Hour 2, Sean Hannity Show, 800-941.
Sean, you want to be a part of the program.
There are estimates anywhere between 10 and 80-plus thousand Americans, and if you add the interpreters, those that America had promised, that if they assist us on the ground, that if, God forbid, anything ever went south or we were to leave and their lives were in jeopardy, that they would be helped out.
So, uh...
That's a promise that was made by America to the individuals that were supposedly helping us to fight and win a war.
You know, why we're fighting wars that we don't win, I will never understand.
How ISIS was allowed to build out the way they were, I will never understand.
How Donald Trump systematically drove the caliphate into the ground is just a case in point with modern military technology.
The capabilities we now have, we've never had before, obviously could have been employed here had anyone had the will to do it, but they decided not to.
There was a moment, actually, a guy by the name of Matt Zeller is his name, passionately just pounding Brian Williams.
And I guess former CIA Director Brennan was on there as well, but I didn't hear a peep out of him in the clip that I saw about all of the Americans and then those that were our closest allies in this whole conflict over 20 years that are being left behind.
Listen to what he says.
Oh, I'm curious to hear your reaction of this consequential speech by the American president.
Didn't run from it.
He owned it.
He owned his decision.
He owned the fact that, as he put it, the buck stops with him.
I hope he gets owned their deaths too.
I feel like I watched a different speech than the rest of you guys.
I was appalled.
There was such a profound bold-faced lie in that speech.
The idea that we plan for every contingency.
I have been personally trying to tell this administration since it took office.
I've been trying to tell our government for years that this was coming.
We sent them plan after plan on how to evacuate these people.
Nobody listened to us.
They didn't plan for the evacuation of our Afghan wartime allies.
They're trying to conduct it now at the 11th hour.
The thing that they were most concerned about was the optics of a chaotic evacuation.
Well, they got exactly what they were most concerned of by failing to do what was right when we could have done it.
We had all the people and equipment in place to be able to save these people months ago, and we did nothing.
I'm appalled that he thinks that we only need to take 2,000 people.
There's 86,000 people who are currently left behind in Afghanistan alone.
We've identified all of them for the government.
I have no idea why he claims that people don't want to leave Afghanistan.
I have a list of 14,000 names right now of people who want to get out of Afghanistan.
And the idea that the Afghan military should be blamed for this, do you know how many casualties the Afghan military took in an average year?
More than the United States did in 20.
When you're not getting paid on a regular basis, when you're not getting fuel, when no one is supplying you with ammunition, and yet you're still showing up to the fight, how dare us for having to blame these people for not having the audacity to be able to survive a Taliban onslaught.
No, no, no, no.
What we need to be doing right now, and what I am appalled that the president didn't say, was we need to be talking about how we're going to get every single one of these people out.
Because let's be abundantly clear.
People like me looked these people in the eye and made them a promise.
We promised them that in their time of need, we would take care of them.
How do you ever expect anyone to ever trust us again if we don't do that now while we can?
And I'm sick and tired of trying to defer to the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan on what we're going to do.
We're the United States of America.
They're terrified of us.
I have Afghans on the ground right now who are telling me they're going door to door in Kabul and they're making lists of people who used to work with us.
They're telling them with smiles on their face, evil smiles, that they're going to be back from them once we leave.
So we either take them now or these people are going to die.
I've been trying to tell anyone who will listen, this is a never again moment in the making.
I mean, it's a stunning rebuke of this idiocy of the likes of Brian Williams.
Well, he owned it.
You know, this was a consequential speech, and he owned it.
He didn't own it.
He blamed Trump.
He didn't own it.
He blamed the Afghan president that fled.
He didn't own it.
He blamed the Afghan military that he was praising two weeks ago as one of the best militaries in the world.
And they're prepared for anything that the Taliban throws at them because they've got 300,000 trained people in an Air Force and the Taliban only has 75,000.
How could you be so spectacularly wrong?
And now what we're watching and learning is that the Pentagon, they warned Biden for months and months about this debacle potential.
The Taliban now beating people who try to reach the airport.
They've now surrounded the perimeter so nobody else can get out.
And the hope is that you can get the people at the airport out in the tens of thousands.
And the Taliban is now consolidating their control in Afghanistan's capital.
And on top of everything, what I mentioned earlier is the top Taliban terrorist.
Yeah, Obama and Joe let him go from Gitmo.
We had him in our, we had him captured already.
Great job, Joe.
Former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich is with us to react to all of this and how maybe possibly we can save these American lives and the lives of those that risked everything there that we had promised to help.
Well, look, I think we can save a lot of lives if we're prepared to bring massive air power into the region.
And I think the minute you had six or eight or ten B-52s flying over various Taliban headquarters, you would have sent the signal that they need to stand down until we get done leaving.
And if they're not going to stand down, I mean, they're not in a position to tell us we have two weeks.
We're in a position to tell them that we're going to, you know, they would like to be in the seventh century.
We can help bomb them into it if they're really serious.
We know that very, very few Americans, combined with air power, collaborating with a lot of very gutsy Afghans, had fought the Taliban basically to a defeat where they were able to operate in the rural areas.
They couldn't capture and keep any of the provincial towns.
This is entirely a function of the Biden left-wing, you know, have a weak America, be nice to your enemies, be bad to your allies.
And frankly, one of the most despicable things any president has said in my lifetime was Biden attacking the Afghans for not being willing to fight.
As your last guest said, or the tape you played, they lost 66,000 troops in a situation where they weren't always.
That's not what Biden.
Sir, I don't mean to interrupt.
I apologize.
But Biden said that this is one of the most capable armies ever on the face of the earth and that they destroy the Taliban.
How do you make such a dramatic miscalculation?
Well, I mean, one of the things Congress ought to do is dig into what was the real advice.
I mean, Was the advice that Biden got three or four or five weeks ago from the Pentagon, from the intelligence community, from the State Department, was it accurate or not?
I mean, how does he go from, we're clearly going to win.
Remember the promise?
I think this would be, by the way, a devastating commercial where he says you're never going to see helicopters leave the American embassy like happened in Saigon.
Of course, he was a senator when they left the embassy in Saigon.
You know, of course, you could play Biden saying that, and you could put next to it the footage of the American helicopters leaving the embassy in Kabul.
And it just proves this administration, they can't control the border.
They can't control spending.
They can't control crime.
And they can't defeat our enemies overseas.
Can I beg to differ?
It's not that they can't.
They don't want to.
Well, I accept that.
I think, in fact, they have a commitment to a weaker America.
I think these are mostly, you know, Biden is surrounded by anti-American left-wingers who don't want America to be strong.
That's why they kill the pipeline in the U.S. and then go and beg OPEC to pump more oil and gas while giving the Russians permission to build a pipeline to Western Europe.
I mean, you can't explain this administration except as a deep commitment to weakening and undermining America.
Quick break more with former Speaker of the House, Newt Kingrich.
By the way, has anyone stopped to think at all about how Gold Star families are feeling today?
Those that lost loved ones?
Anyway, we'll get to that.
We'll get to your calls as well.
800-941-Sean is our number.
All right, we continue.
Former Speaker of the House, Newt Kingrich, is with us analyzing this unmitigated disaster in Afghanistan.
So now my next question is very simple because we're now being told by our State Department, Mr. Speaker, that Americans that are there need to shelter in place.
Then we're told defense officials, they're saying they're going to be able to extract about 5,000 Americans a day from Kabul when we've got up to 40,000 plus stranded in Kabul right now, many of them at the airport and many that can't get to the airport.
And Taliban fighters now have closed in on the airport and have created a perimeter preventing anybody from getting anywhere near it if they wanted to.
What are we supposed to do about that?
Well, remember, Kabul is only one city.
I mean, how many Americans are scattered across the countryside?
How many of them are in provincial capitals?
And how many of our allies, I mean, I don't think we should focus only on the Americans.
How many interpreters who are marked for death and their families are marked for death?
How many Afghan pilots whose entire family is marked for death?
I mean, there are a lot of folks out there at risk because of Biden's cowardly withdrawal.
And I think that it's clear that they didn't do any kind of serious planning.
I think you need to explain to people because they probably likely don't know, and they're thinking, oh, here we go.
We're going to be the world's welcome center for refugees around the world.
To me, it almost takes on the gravity and significance of, for example, those people, refugees from Cuba, that know that they will be killed if they went back to Cuba at the time.
And I'm talking about early in the Castro regime.
Sure.
And, okay, the significance of these interpreters, the Taliban knows who they are.
They will die because they were actively assisting us in our military efforts.
Their families will die as well.
They're dead.
They're marked for dead.
Right.
And I think there are two parts of it.
One is just honor.
And we have a moral obligation to people who risk their lives to help us.
The other is practical.
We want to send a signal around the world that if you've got the guts to stand with the U.S., the U.S. is going to stand with you.
I mean, we are sending right now a terrible signal of weakness.
If you were in Taiwan or South Korea, or if you were in Western Europe, are you going to trust the United States?
Are you going to think, oh, yeah, this administration's got real guts and they're going to stand firmly with me?
Or are you going to say, boy, I sure hope nothing happens because I don't think I could count on Joe Biden for anything?
Well, it's beyond a little bit scary here.
But the Taliban now, this is in the UK mirror, is now drawing up kill lists for the Afghanis that helped the U.S.
It shows the level of dangerous incompetence here.
The fact that I don't know if it's an intelligence failure or if Joe just didn't listen to the military.
I mean, that's yet to be determined.
The Pentagon is claiming very loudly that they warned Biden for months and months about this debacle and what would happen if it was handled this way.
And on the other end of it, and I'll know more because I'm interviewing President Trump on Hannity tonight.
I'll know more later tonight.
I am told that the big distinction in the president's withdrawal, planned withdrawal from Afghanistan, was that the Taliban and the president spoke directly.
And the president said, did you see what I did in Syria and how I destroyed the caliphate?
And apparently, about the sternest warning you could ever give any group of people was sent out loud and clear that they will be blown into oblivion if they dare get in the way of any city.
Never mind the fact that as of late last week, they had 60% of Afghanistan, or the, I guess we should say, Islamic emirates of Afghanistan under now Taliban control.
And nobody seems to have the same fear of Joe Biden.
They seem to walk with impunity.
I think they're as shocked as everyone.
Well, you may remember one of the early steps of the Trump administration was to drop the largest bomb we've ever used, the largest non-nuclear bomb we've ever used, on a site to send a signal that there's no place you can hide.
If we come after you, we're going to get you.
And I do believe, and I've had similar conversations you have with President Trump.
I do believe that he communicated with great force that if the Taliban broke their word, remember, he had a very principled set of negotiating steps.
And if the Taliban broke any of the steps, then he reserved the right to use massive air power to punish them until they got back in line.
And so this wasn't a one-time simple conversation.
This was a, here is a roadmap by which we can end the fighting, save a lot of lives, but you guys aren't going to get to occupy all of Afghanistan.
And there was no break in the Afghan army during the period that Trump was doing this, even though people knew he was doing it.
But they trusted him.
They believed that he would do that.
They trusted him, but also the Taliban feared him.
Right.
Well, the Afghans on our side trusted him, and the Afghans on the Taliban side feared him.
All right, Mr. Speaker, we always appreciate having you.
800-941-Sean is our number.
If you want to be a part of the program, full coverage of this with President Trump tonight, what is different?
What was different in his planning?
What was different in his planning at the border?
What is different in his planning with energy and with COVID and inflation and everything else that we're experiencing makes you kind of miss those mean tweets, doesn't it?
All right, 25 to the top of the hour, 800-941, Sean, if you want to be a part of the program.
I know so many of you have been wanting to get in here, and we've got a lot of ground left to cover, including, yeah, how do our Gold Star families feel today?
How does our friend Billy Vaughan?
He lost his gold, his Navy SEAL son, Aaron, and our friend Israel Del Toro, 80% of his body burned in very severe burns that he suffered when his Humvee rolled over an IED.
How do you think everyone's feeling today?
What are we going to do to extract these Americans?
Let's say hi to Eric in Alabama.
Eric, hi, how are you?
Glad you called.
I am doing great, sir.
How are you?
I'm good.
What's going on?
Well, first off, I've been following you since about 1996 on Fox News.
So I'm 44 years old.
I'd like to say thank you for being such a meaningful and instrumental part of my life.
Sincerely, thank you.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
It means a lot to me.
It really does.
You know, I spent years in Alabama.
I had a great time.
Oh, I'm down in the Gulf Coast.
If you've never been down here, it's a little bit better.
But to my question, I would never ask anyone to speak for the late, great Rush Limbaugh, but I had been listening to him slightly longer than I was following you.
And he always said that, don't panic.
I will tell you when it's time to panic.
And again, we don't have him to answer that question.
So I know that you were a true, true friend through James Golden's comments on your show.
You weren't just a colleague.
You weren't just similar careers.
You were a true, dear friend.
So you're probably going to be a good person.
I'm friends with the entire family.
His brother's been my attorney for over 30 years.
Nobody could ever replace this man.
He was a patriot beyond words.
And we learned a lot about Rush in the last year of his life.
Not that I really didn't know it already.
We know what his bucket list was.
You know what his bucket list was, Eric?
To be on the air, get well enough.
His bucket list was to get what, you know, go through the hell of chemo and cancer treatment to get just well enough, barely, most days not really there, but he did it anyway, to be on the air with the people that he loved most, his audience and his family.
You were his family.
Amen.
So are you asking me, have we hit that inflection point where I'll let you know when it's time to be there?
I guess kind of like how would you think Rush would be feeling?
Would Rush be telling us it's time to panic?
And I don't mean in the literal pull your hair out, go crazy sense, of course.
No, I mean the Delta variant, the Lambda, Lambda, Lambda variant, you know, the revenge of the nerds, what's going on in Afghanistan, the border, the inflation, just everything that's going on.
I personally don't think 2022 is going to matter because I think Biden, I mean, he's a stroke of a pen away from doing something to take that away from us too.
So I'm not sure if 2022 truly matters.
I'm trying to hold on to hope.
I'm praying every night, but I don't know if 2022 is truly going to be the turning point because we're not far away from one poor decision or one backhanded deal, and we're done.
One of the things I loved about Rush, I wouldn't even begin to think that I could speak for him or in a way that he would articulate it himself and nobody could match it.
I would not ask you to, sir.
But I would say this.
Am I at the point that I think it's over?
No, I'm not.
Am I at the point that I'm as worried as I've ever been?
I am.
Am I at the point when I very specifically repeat by design the things that need to happen now so that we can have elections with integrity that we'll all have confidence in the results in?
That being point number one.
Anytime leftism, authoritarianism, socialism, or Levin calls it American Marxism or post-constitutional America, anytime we hit these moments, it's amazing America snaps back because we see the failure unfolding on every level.
I said in my opening monologue yesterday, can you name one thing that Joe Biden has done that is successful?
And I can't.
I don't care if it's the border.
I don't care if it's COVID.
I don't care if it's energy.
I don't care if it's the economy.
I don't care if it's inflation.
I don't care if it's China, Russia, Afghanistan, Iran.
I can't cite a single thing where it's working.
Now, the hope I have is that states have come to the conclusion that as a result of the pandemic, laws were ignored in the 2020 election.
We know that for a fact.
It's indisputable.
When you have laws that say partisan observers can observe the vote count and you don't abide by them, that's not abiding by the law.
And we know the flurry of last-minute additions that would even, in the case of Pennsylvania, circumvent their own state constitution.
We know that happened too.
We read the Supreme Court 3-4 decision, the dissent, a stinging dissent by the Chief Justice and the Supreme Court of Wisconsin.
But the good news is, is people are making those changes.
That's step one.
What Biden is doing is it's like you just watch it unfold and fail.
I think we're talking about it because it's so important.
We've got Americans now that have no idea if they're ever going to make it home that are left in Afghanistan.
And I don't say that lightly.
They don't know if they're coming home.
And yes, we see China now threatening the U.S. regularly when they're not lecturing us on human rights.
And, you know, I think the Chinese communist newspapers admonition that they're saying that the U.S. will abandon Taiwan just like they did Afghanistan.
I think that probably is an accurate assertion.
That is what they see.
They don't see Biden through the rose-colored filtered glasses of the media mob protection program.
Well, they don't have to.
But I do have hope.
How to see things.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, they see Biden for who he is, and their description matches yours and mine, that he's weak, frail.
He's a cognitive mess and not in charge.
That's what they say.
That's what I say.
My description isn't allowed on the radio, sir.
Neither is mine.
You know, I could write a great book, everything I would say, and the way I would say it, but can't say it because it would get me fired, okay?
I could write that book.
Sign me up.
I'll be first in line to buy that one.
But the answer is I'm not at the inflection point, and I'm going to tell you why.
Because I know that the heart and soul of this country is full of good people.
America, as flawed as it is, always strives and has made incredible strides towards the more perfect union.
And that was the beauty of our founders and framers.
Is it as at risk as much as I've ever seen in my lifetime?
The answer to that question is yes.
You know, I'll bring you into a private conversation than Rush and I had.
What you used to have, and I used to ask him, I said, I am not optimistic.
And he said, I have to be.
And I thought a lot about that answer since he's passed away.
And at one point, he said, I hear exactly where you're coming from.
I'm there a lot, meaning that you wonder if our better days are behind us.
But I just believe in the people in this country that they will, we're going to fix this and we're going to get it right.
It starts with election reform.
It starts with the election in 2022 and then 2024.
And if we just look at that short-term window, and it'll happen very quickly, you know, look, I've been on radio 33 years.
I've been in TV 25.
I have no freaking idea how that happened.
So time flies.
My kids are now, well, one's graduated from college, one's, you know, finishing college.
So I just have faith that the American people see what you and I see and that we will that there will be a course correction.
And I hope it's now because we really don't have much time.
I'm worried about the timeframe now.
So the panic button, though, I'm not ready to hit the eject button yet.
Okay.
Does that help you?
Like I said, I just felt you're the close your relationship with Rush.
If it was going to come from anybody, I feel that people would need to hear it from you since we don't have the great Rush Limbaugh to answer the question.
You know what I miss the most?
I'll tell you what I miss the most about him.
And I never, I didn't have a lot of time to listen to him because I have to prepare and quiet every day.
It's just the way my mind works.
I have my papers.
I have to organize them.
I have to put them in piles.
And, you know, I'm like very regimented all week long.
I live my life like a Marine and barely, I just have a routine.
Work out, study, do a show, work out more, eat, do a, you know, write, do a show.
Okay.
Then try and sleep.
And, you know, what Rush had that I think was so unique to him is a take on everything that I'd always say, I wish I thought of that.
It's like Levin has a gift.
Levin's gift is his constitutional expertise.
He's a constitutional scholar.
It's his passion.
He studies it whether he's writing a book or not writing a book because he shares it with me all the time.
We talk all the time.
And I think being angry on the radio and making it sound like how we all agree with.
We want each other.
I'll say it.
Nobody else will say it.
There.
I said it.
I used to do on stage occasionally do Rush.
Sean Hannity dropped the golden EIB mic.
What a great broadcaster.
You dented it also, did you not?
Yeah, okay.
You know what?
You know, I feel like going all Mark, get off my phone, you creep.
Anyway, you know, we're all spokes in a wheel.
And let me just tell you this, Eric.
No one spoke is more important than the other.
This isn't about me.
It's not about Mark.
Rush would want us to fight.
That I can tell you.
Rush loved this country.
His passion was this country.
His passion were the people of this country.
And you are as important a spoke as he was.
Mark is.
Whatever I am, I'm a spoke.
And, you know, we need every spoke in the wheel to make this thing work.
And I don't care if the only thing you do is call your state representatives and get integrity in election laws, just integrity, just fairness.
That's all you're asking for.
Voter ID, signature verification.
If you just get out and vote and make sure that it's important to you, if you make sure that we get the right candidates to run, if nothing else, if you donate to people that really need to get a message out sometimes, I'm not allowed to do it because of what I do.
And, you know, that wheel will turn back around and we could turn the country around.
It's not just the United States that needs the United States.
It's our kids.
It's our grandkids.
That's first and foremost in our mind.
I don't know how old you said you're younger than I am, but, you know, less about.
Okay, for me at this point in my life, it's less about me and more about my kids, my grandkids, and your kids and your grandkids.
I have five kids of myself here.
Okay, that's zone defense and then some.
Good luck to you.
I don't know how the hell you do it.
Well, I was in a band when I was younger, too.
Did you sing or play guitar or the drums?
What did you do?
I played bass and I was like a co-lead singer, the style of the music at the time in the early 90s before I joined the Corps.
Well, Sen for Fidelis, Marine.
Listen.
Just remember this.
All of us matter here.
You know, there might be 10%, 15% of disagreement at times.
I don't care about that.
Reagan, address that.
If you're 80% in agreement with me, you're 80% my friend.
You're not my enemy.
We have enough enemies out there.
We have enough people that want to silence us, cancel us.
We have enough people that want to indoctrinate and brainwash our kids.
We have enough people that have no problem in the middle of a pandemic with open borders.
Enough people that are perfectly satisfied to have Joe Biden beg OPEC to increase oil production.
Other people perfectly fine.
The hell with the people that are stuck in Afghanistan.
Joe did the right thing.
No, he didn't.
Perfectly fine to be threatened by China, let China take over Taiwan.
Perfectly fine with the Iranians getting a nuclear weapon.
I'm not fine with any of it.
And I just know that living in this country, it is the last, greatest, best hope for man on earth.
And as much as it's important for us and our kids and our grandkids, we are that important to the world.
That's how deep this is.
That's how concerned I am.
I'm not hitting the panic button.
After Election Day 2024, I might.
I'll let you know.
Please don't.
Please don't let me let that happen.
Don't let it happen.
We can prevent it from happening.
God bless you, Maureen.
Thank you for all you do.
You're on for another 25 years.
All right.
All right.
Easy.
You know, I'm trying to get through one day at a time.
800-941-Sean is our number.
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