RUSH: Apparently Senator McCain has spoken out, ladies and gentlemen, on the Supreme Court decision today that allows inmates at Guantanamo Bay to seek hearings on their detention in US federal court and being granted rights equivalent to those of United States citizens. McCain said, ‘It obviously concerns me. These are unlawful combatants.’ What? Is an unlawful…? Well, start again. ‘It obviously concerns me. These are unlawful combatants. They are not American citizens. I think we should pay attention to Justice Roberts’ opinion in this decision. It’s a decision the Supreme Court made. We have to move forward. I’ve always favored the closing of Guantanamo Bay, and I still think we ought to do that.’ Well, that’s… Well, that’s cool. That’s decisive. That’s definitive. Back to the phones, I think. Bill in Le Claire, Iowa, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thank you very much for taking my call today.
RUSH: Yes, sir.
CALLER: Hey, just real quick, if enemy combatants have access to the US court system —
RUSH: No, no, no. They’re called unlawful combatants.
CALLER: Oh, I’m sorry, unlawful combatants.
RUSH: Senator McCain called ’em ‘unlawful combatants.’ I don’t know what one of those is, either, but that’s what he called ’em.
CALLER: (laughter) Well, if they have access to the US court system now, shouldn’t US soldiers also have the same access to those court systems?
RUSH: Well, what worries me is here’s what’s going to happen with this. All of these detainees — or 270 of them — are going to get hearings before a US district judge, and they are going to be able to make the case that they are not enemy combatants. They’re going bring their lawyers. They’re going to lawyer up, and they’re going to have plenty of ACLU-type lawyers defending them on the content, in the sense that they’re not enemy combatants, and then the judge decides. And if the judge says, ‘You know what, we think you’re right, Sahib. You’re not an enemy combatant,’ then he has to be released, and the US government has gotta release the guy. That’s what happens here.
CALLER: But doesn’t this turn over a part of the Military Code of Justice?
RUSH: The Supreme Court has just said that all these military tribunal things are unconstitutional, that they can’t do that, that these people… This is what’s breathtaking, groundbreaking, whatever, about this. These are prisoners of war. They have constitutional rights to have the charges against them (quote, unquote, ‘charges’ against them) heard in a US courtroom. These are people captured on the battlefield. You asked about the US military. My question is, are we going to have to track down the people that captured each individual citizen — or, sorry enemy combatant — and then go through, in terms of testimony, the process that led to the capture and transporting them to Guantanamo? And at some point are we going to say these people — enemy combatants! Soldiers, whether they wear uniforms or not, representing the enemy — have to be given Miranda rights? Where does this go? I mean, if we’re talking US constitutional rights, we’re talking Miranda, aren’t we?
CALLER: Well, absolutely, and I guess I don’t understand why the Supreme Court wouldn’t have understood it. Doesn’t this give the US courts, then, the —
RUSH: They understood it perfectly. The five justices on this court understood perfectly what they were doing. They didn’t make a mistake.
CALLER: Well, doesn’t this give the federal courts, though, the ability to rule whether or not their capture was under excessive force?
RUSH: Yeah! Pfft! Not only that, gives the federal court the decision to determine whether or not they’re actually the enemy!
CALLER: Well, that, too, but they can also say that, ‘Well, the systems that they used to capture us, the weapons they used to capture us were excessive force’?
RUSH: Well, who knows where this is going to go.
CALLER: That’s true.
RUSH: You know, excessive force? Was the soldier mean? Did the soldier deny civil rights to the enemy combatant? If you’re gonna grant these people constitutional rights, at what point do you say, ‘Okay, those are all the constitutional rights you get.’ If we’re going to grant them constitutional rights — habeas corpus to go to a courtroom and make the case that they’re not the enemy — and a judge gets to decide this, then what’s happened here, when you say, ‘Doesn’t the Supreme Court understand?’ The leftists — not just on the Supreme Court, the leftists throughout American judiciary — want to take the right to prosecute war away from the commander-in-chief and turn it over to themselves.
CALLER: I just see that this is going to have so many unintended consequences.
RUSH: No, it has many
CALLER: (laughs)
RUSH: No, I don’t. I think in some cases they don’t appreciate the dynamism of an economy when they come up with laws that punish certain types of economic activity. When it comes to the liberal judiciary, these are leftists, folks. They have every intention of changing the way this country looks, cutting this country down to size. I’ve been through all the reasons. They think we’re too big. We’re stealing the world’s resources. We’re destroying the planet with global warming. We’ve got this idiot president they can’t figure out how to beat. He’s so stupid he keeps beating them, and we gotta get rid of him. He’s illegitimate, his war is unjust; his policies are unjust. Look, there’s a systematic desire — and it’s been going on for quite a while — to change or get rid of the institutions and traditions that have always defined and maintained the country’s greatness. It’s a very serious problem.
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RUSH: Now, folks, our last conversation we had with the last caller. We’re not at Miranda rights yet, but we don’t know where we’re going, so I’m mentioning that simply as a possibility. We could get there with this ruling. We’re not at Miranda rights yet. US soldiers do not have to Mirandize Sahib and Skyhook when they capture ’em in Basra. They’re not going to be bringing them to Club Gitmo anyway. That’s the point. But the reason is the Supreme Court has not yet explained what due-process rights the enemy gets. They are waiting to second-guess whatever we do. See, the leftists on this court purposely are leaving things open and ’cause people will continue to try to work around this decision. So as a work-around is perhaps hatched, then the court gets to rule on it again and say, ‘No, you can’t do that, either.’ So a lot of this remains right now. What this is about now, this decision today, is access to civilian courts to raise objections to their detention. That is, forcing the government to tell a civilian judge the reason that the enemy is being held.
At some time Miranda might get raised; 20 other due process issues might. But at this point we just don’t know. There’s a lot left open here. Now, that’s the real problem with this decision. When you have judges making their decisions this way, the real issue is separation of powers. Now you have judges making decisions that used to be made by the commander-in-chief which is why some of us think this is a wholesale violation of the US Constitution and the separation of powers. But the supremes, what are we going to do about that? They can sit there and right their own laws. Again, Miranda is the extreme aspect of it. The bigger issue is who makes these decisions in the middle of a war? Are we gonna turn over more and more aspects of fighting a war to the Supreme Court and the US judiciary, or are we gonna leave it where it’s always been constitutionally: in the executive, the commander-in-chief? I might add, the judges are the least qualified to make these decisions. The least qualified. By the way, the official title — McCain was half right — is they are ‘unlawful enemy combatants.’ He said ‘unlawful combatants,’ and left out enemy. Unlawful enemy combatants.
RUSH: A. J. in Millstone, New Jersey, thank you for calling, sir. It’s great to have you here.
CALLER: Mr. Limbaugh, it’s a great honor to speak to you, sir — and on my birthday, too, one added bonus.
RUSH: Happy birthday to you, sir.
CALLER: Thank you. Thank you. You know, I wanted to talk a little bit about this upcoming election. Look, I’m not a McCain fan in the least. He’s wrong on a whole host of issues. But I think it’s a fundamental question here: Is this great union of ours going to survive? And I think we need to have someone who’s good on the war. We can’t have this surrender, this appeasement that Obama’s going to bring. You know, this from a guy who just came back from my first tour in Iraq. You know, the war is the number-one issue for me. For me, we can’t afford to surrender on it. You know, I want to say something, too, about the Allen Brothers. I had some of that actually before I left. It’s phenomenal. When I came back here, I was looking forwarding to getting some more. U nfortunately, on a private’s salary it’s hard to come by, but I’m looking forward to hopefully soon.
RUSH: Well, glad you enjoyed it. It is succulent and delicious stuff. I want to get back to something you said about you didn’t want to lose the union. Is our great union going to survive? Yes, the union’s going to survive. The question is, what’s it going to look like? The union, as you call it, the nation; has a uniqueness due to its founding. Its founding was basically on natural law and common sense, and this is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and throughout the Constitution. And at the root, at the foundation of all this is individual liberty and freedom because that’s how we were created by our founders with inalienable rights, ‘among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ and that’s why the tenets of conservatism will never go out of style because basic liberty will never go out of style. It is basic liberty and freedom that provides the greatest obstacle to the left in changing the country to what they want it to be.
They want it to be a socialist-type country, a bigger and bigger government. They are naive or dangerous or both. They are upset by the inequality of outcomes throughout society. It’s not fair. They think that the country can be perfected. Perfected equals everybody is the same; nobody has an advantage over anybody else for whatever reason, and as long as those circumstances exist and others, then this country is one that’s unjust. An example of an unfair advantage over others is our large military, our nuclear arsenal. This makes this country unjust and unfair. It’s not fair we can dominate and control anybody else we want to, and so in order to prevent us from doing that, they have taken steps over the years to weaken the ability and the strength of the US military and the executive to act militarily. When they have not been able to stop us acting militarily, then they do what they’ve been doing here during the Iraq war, and they do everything they can to secure the defeat of the US military.
These are people who, in varying degrees and for multiple reasons, do not like America as it is currently constituted and wish to change it. And it is all based on this notion that they believe we can be perfected. They, of course, defining what is ‘imperfect’ from person to person, from institution to institution. Now, a lot of people have asked me, ‘Rush, how come it’s so easy for these people to get this done? Why are there so many of these people?’ The answer is simple but it’s complex at the same time, and it is rooted in the notion that anything that is not by definition conservative will be liberal. Liberal is a natural emotional state. Conservatism requires an intellectual education, application, and understanding. Let me give you an example of this. You people have listened to this program long enough, you understand where I come down when it comes to free markets and business. The purpose of business is not to create jobs for the community; it’s to seek a profit in the product or service that they manufacture or provide, for a whole host of reasons.
Whatever they do to ingratiate themselves in the community is a PR battle, or a PR marketing endeavor, but that’s not why they exist. Companies don’t exist for you to have a job. Whoever had the original idea for Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Oil thought that there might be practical applications for it in society that would make him a lot of money — and at the same time do well for the people that bought it. He didn’t say, ‘You know what? Cincinnati needs employees. They need houses, need hospitals. I think I’ll start a company.’ That’s not how it happens. I was talking to Professor Hazlett when I could get him away from my Mac Pro the other night, my MacBook Pro; and I was asking him about this. We were talking about economics. He’s an economist, a classic economist. And when you listen to him explain it, it is just as simple to understand as 2 + 2 = 4. But for those who have never been trained in it and those who have not applied an attempt to understand it, it’s Greek.
And we were talking, I asked him this question. I wanted his theory. Why do so many people, for example, end up hitting the one group of guys that’s doing anything to make sure there’s gasoline in their tank? Why do so many Americans want to just skin them alive, when in fact the people that are making it hard for there to be gasoline in the tank and the people that are responsible for raising the prices are in fact the Democrats and legislators and others, the environmentalists, who are preventing an increase in supply for whatever reason.? How come the environmentalists aren’t the ones that are hated? I said, Professor, how come the big oil companies are hated? And he started into his answer, and I said, ‘Wait a minute, I can answer this myself,’ because I was once one of these people that looked at management and thought, ‘Gee what a bunch of cold-hearted, cruel SOBs,’ before I understood various basics and realities.
Now, what I’m going to say here is not to be critical of the company I’m going to mention. In fact, it was one of the greatest five-year educations I ever had in preparing me for getting back to radio. It was the five years I spent working in sales for the Kansas City Royals. I was 28 years old when I started there, and I was making $12,000 a year. This is 1979. That was embarrassing. I had quit radio. I thought, ‘Well, I gave it my best shot. It wasn’t going to work,’ but this was not even one-third what I was making when I left radio and went to the baseball team. I made $12,000 at age 28! It was embarrassing. And I got a one-thousand-dollar-a-year raise every year. So after five years when I left, I was making seventeen, and then I was 33. It was still embarrassing: $17,000 a year at age 33. I’m 57 now, so what was it, 24 years ago?
While I’m making my 17, $18,000 a year — and, by the way, I’m driving a clunker car that I can’t keep running. I had a house that I had no business buying, but everybody said, ‘Buy a house! You need equity,’ but I couldn’t afford to maintain the house. I could barely afford the payment. The house payment and the MasterCard bill came in the same two-week period a month. I had to delay one of them every month. I switched off delaying them. And I knew that the people I worked for understood this, because when I complained about it, I’d asked for a raise. They’d say, ‘No, do some work. You want a raise, do some more work.’ I’d already working 18-hour days during home stands. So I went out and started selling more advertising on signage in the ballpark and the scoreboard, to publications.
I said, ‘Can I get a commission?’
‘No, we’re not going to give you a commission.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, we gotta give George Brett a commission for every home run he hits tomorrow. We’ve gotta sell more tickets. We can’t upset the applecart.’
And I’m sitting there and I’m pulling my heart out. Everybody in advertising and sales gets commissions! And then in the off season I’m watching them redo the landscaping around the ballpark, and they’re putting in hundreds of thousands of dollars of trees — and all I’m asking for is $5,000! It would make all the difference in the world, but, ‘Nope, we don’t have it.’
And I’m sitting there saying, ‘God, these guys, they’re just inhuman! These guys don’t have any compassion whatsoever.’
What the truth of the matter was, is that they weren’t running their business to make my life solvent and they weren’t running their business to make me happy and keep me there. I had a job that if I decided to leave they could fill for less than half what they were paying me, ’cause at baseball teams, everybody in the world wants to work for. Doctors from all over Kansas City would call and beg to be the team doctor for nothing! Everybody wants to be a part of them. The team back then was winning big. But landscaping the ballpark, that’s part of the upkeep of the property, which is required. Business expenses are what they are. You don’t pay more than you have to for anything. In this situation, I was involved in the revenue stream somewhat.
But it didn’t count because they said, ‘Look, Rush, you got a lot to learn here. You may be out selling advertising in the scoreboard and on the signage of the ballpark and so forth. But if you leave tomorrow do you think we’re going to lose ads? The phones are going to ring here. We’ll find somebody to answer it.’
It’s the way the business was. The job I had had a limit. It had a limit based on the business requirements, and they were not there to treat me nice. They treated me nice — I don’t want to give you the impression here that they were mean about any of this — it was just their business the way they ran it. They had to allocate most of their funds for players. Players are what generated the revenue for them. The ballpark signage revenue back then, the scoreboard advertising, it wasn’t that much. It was, you know, nice to have. The players are what generated ticket sales, season ticket sales and a number of other things. That was the most education I had. I’d not gone to college, as you know. I didn’t have any fundamental formatically presented Econ 101 classes.
But once you understand these various aspects of things, then it all takes a different picture. But a lot of people don’t understand. I understand why people hate management. I understand why people think they’re being screwed with, why they’re being treated unfairly, why management doesn’t look at them as human beings and see if they only earn another $5,000 it would change their life. But as I was told, ‘Work harder.’ You know, ‘Go earn it, if that’s what you want — and if it’s not here, if we don’t have it here for you, go get it someplace else.’ If I hadn’t had this education and a little foundation in conservatism when I was being raised, I could be one of these people today that hates the Big Oil companies for not understanding what they do.
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RUSH: William in Livermore, California, I’m glad you waited, sir. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, how are you?
RUSH: Good, sir.
CALLER: Longtime listener, been listening since about 1990.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I’d like to make one point. If the court is so bent on trying to disregard the Constitution and yet we demand that our soldiers protect and honor the Constitution, why not encourage these boys just not to enlist and see what the heck they’re going to do with nobody there to protect them.
RUSH: Well, I understand your anger on this, but that’s not the right moral of the story. You know what the moral of the story is?
CALLER: What’s that?
RUSH: Don’t take any prisoners.
CALLER: Yeah. I agree. But we don’t want to turn our kids into murderers, either.
RUSH: Don’t fall for this. We are in a war.
CALLER: Well, I understand that, but there’s still a difference between cold blood and, you know —
RUSH: Look, the reason these clowns are called unlawful enemy combatants is because they do not get official privileges of the Geneva Conventions, and yet the Supreme Court took care of that. The Supreme Court said, oh, yes, they do, they do get protection under the Geneva Conventions, even though — read the conventions — they are not covered.
CALLER: I agree.
RUSH: It’s been extended to them. I’m not saying turn them into murderers.
CALLER: We just don’t want —
RUSH: I’m not suggesting we walk into some terrorist’s house while he’s asleep or smoking his peace pipe or whatever and go rat-tat-tat, not suggesting we do that at all. I’m not suggesting we become like them in defeating them. But at the same time I don’t even know how we can set up other prisons.
CALLER: I would just rather the kids just stay home, you know, until we have a government that decides —
RUSH: They’ll just start a draft if you do that, and the left will gin that all up again.