RUSH: Richard in Atlanta. We’re going to start with you. It’s great to have you with us today on the EIB Network.
CALLER: It is an awesome honor and privilege to speak with you, Mr. Limbaugh.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I’ve been listening to you since 1990. I’ve been conservative my whole life. I have a 21-year-old lance corporal son in the Marine Corps. I am very, very distressed about our commander-in-chief. I have no confidence in him, and he has none, either. He was sent to Ramadi last year. He spent seven months in Iraq last year. In January he’s set for another deployment, but he doesn’t know whether he’s going to Afghanistan or not. And we just have no confidence in this man. We have no confidence in his leadership abilities. We don’t have confidence in his decision-making. You know, I’m kind of at an end of my rope here with some of this conservative ideas and conservative implementation of this country — and you have to excuse me. I’m very nervous. I’ve been listening to you for years, and it’s an honor speaking to you.
RUSH: Well, I appreciate it. I’d be nervous speaking to me, too. (sigh) Thankfully, I don’t talk to myself, that I know of. But if I did, I would be nervous. Well, you might be interested in knowing this. Your 21-year-old son is a Marine — and another leak has just come out (I think it’s the Washington Post; maybe it’s the New York Times; I just saw it) — and they’re going to expedite the deployment. The first wave of Marines will arrive around Christmastime and this 30,000 deployment he hopes to have completed in six months.
CALLER: Yes, I read that on Drudge Report today.
RUSH: Yeah. It’s on the Drudge Report?
CALLER: Yes. They were saying, an article detailing some of that. His deployment is set for January 18th. His deployment was already set about six months ago. But, you know, I just have no confidence in our leadership if he goes to Afghanistan.
RUSH: Why not?
CALLER: Why not? Look at the examples they have set for the last 11 months, even going back further. To me there’s no difference anymore between a Republican and a Democrat. There are conservatives and liberals. But I see nothing that distinguishes the two parties from each other anymore.
RUSH: Well, wait, wait, wait.
CALLER: I’m very frustrated by that.
RUSH: Wait just a second, now.
CALLER: Sure.
RUSH: (sigh) That’s a wave that’s starting out there that we’re going to have to try to nip in the bud. What you’re saying, I think, is all politicians are the same, whether they’re Republicans or Democrats. And I know the Republican Party has let a lot of people down by not advocating conservatism or implementing it as they campaigned on. But I don’t think that there’s a Republican out there that would propose any of the Obama agenda. I don’t think there’s a Republican out there that would have suggested the way to get out of the recession is to do what Obama did. I mean, there are clear differences between liberals and even moderates Republicans. RINO Republicans are a different thing altogether. The problem politically here is the war within the Republican Party over who is going to dominate it and lead it. But when I hear you say that there’s no difference in the two parties, you’re being set up for this third party stuff. The guaranteed outcome of that is Democrat power in perpetuity. People are just sadly mistaken if they think a third party is the way to battle what’s going on here with the Obama administration and his policies.
Dave in Ludington, Michigan, great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hello, Mr. Limbaugh. Thanks for taking my call. I’m quite stunned I was able to get through.
RUSH: Well, I’m glad you did.
CALLER: Okay. Point I wanted to make — you know, politics aside because I’m of an independent philosophy and I really don’t buy into either party’s politics 100%. So let me just say, as an American, and what I studied, it seems to me the turning point of the entire Afghan war was dropping the ball at Tora Bora. And from what I’ve read — and, you know, Woodward’s book, Bush at War; some 60 Minutes material that I saw not too long ago — suggests that for some crazy reason the Rangers were told to stand down when they had Bin Laden encircled and it was paramount to let the tribesmen take him out. Well, that whole thing stinks to me. I mean, it smells of a precut deal. I’m not making any accusations because I don’t have that information to do so, but very much like the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam was like at turning point, nothing was ever the same since. And that’s my point, I guess.
RUSH: You say you’re an independent.
CALLER: Yes, sir.
RUSH: Sound just like John Kerry in his Senate report on Monday; and you sound just like Maurice Hinchey, a Democrat today.
CALLER: Well, believe me I don’t put credence in what John Kerry really says about Vietnam.
RUSH: Well, you’re just agreeing with him right down the line with what you’ve said here!
CALLER: Well, I know, but these are feelings I’ve had, you know, for couple of years now, and each —
RUSH: And look at the source.
CALLER: — release of information I tended to feel it more.
RUSH: They’re not feelings, they’re thoughts — and look at the source for your thoughts: The media. And whose side is the media always on? You’re citing 60 Minutes, John? You’re citing Bob Woodward? Do you know that we turned Tora Bora 2,000 degrees? I believe (or as some people say, ‘I feel’) that Bin Laden’s dead. I think we got him at Tora Bora. I don’t know that there’s any proof of it, and I think that if we did, we didn’t want to say so. We didn’t want to martyr him and so forth and create an even a bigger hero out of the guy. But it’s interesting that you call today and call yourself an independent, parroting the very strategy that’s articulated in the mainstream media by way of John Kerry and his Senate report. Now, the same guy, John Kerry, in 2001 said, ‘No, no, no! We shouldn’t send more troops in there. We don’t want a quagmire.’ See, you gotta be careful who you align yourself with here. Because when you align yourself with Democrats and claim to be an independent, you sort of make it hard to believe that you are an independent.
Farris in Hartford, Connecticut. Welcome to the program, sir.
CALLER: It’s always a high honor —
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: — to chat, and I wanted to follow your explanation of tonight’s Obama speech at West Point and try to caution everyone about the glamorous trappings of the setting that he’s going to have tonight. For him to be at West Point with the very disciplined response from the audience, you’re going to have to keep a sharp eye (as always, but probably sharper than ever) on what he says rather than the setting that it’s in and the cooperative response he gets from the military. I’m very concerned that he’s going to word his way into a — typically, a — having-it-both-ways outcome.
RUSH: You’re right, but there’s no way he can get anything other than a respectful response. The commander-in-chief is going to the United States Military Academy. He ought to be making this speech from the Oval Office. He’s turning all of this into nothing more than a giant act and using the US Military Academy and whatever people he has behind him purely as props.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: All right, folks. I’m detecting a trend here and it’s time to let you in on what’s going on. First, ‘The two parties, they’re no different.’ That means we need to go third party. ‘There’s no difference between the parties.’ Look, for one thing: The Republican Party, for all its faults, has always wanted to win when we deployed the military. Come on, folks! You gotta get real about this. The Republican Party, as bad as it is, is not the Democrat Party. We do have statists in our party. We do not have socialists and Marxists in our party that have any kind of power whatsoever. And none would ever get elected in our party. Now, snap out of this. Get real. Snap out of it! It’s time to face this and fix it, not abandon it — and a third party is giving up on things. With a third party, you’re just creating another room to go in and shout. You’re just creating a room to go vent, but you’re not gonna get anything done with a third party.
It’s one thing to say in hindsight that the wrong strategy was used vis-a-vis Bin Laden at Tora Bora, but to doubt Bush’s will to capture, defeat, and kill those people behind 9/11 is absurd. I’m not sure Bush was a political trophy hunter, but for Bush to have Bin Laden’s scalp would have been huge, and to pass that up on purpose is literally absurd. It’s insane. And who’s putting it out there? The Democrats! John Kerry is putting it out there. And it’s all to give Obama cover because this is nothing more than an annoyance to him. This is nothing more than an inconvenience. Obama has said he’s not comfortable with the concept of victory in Afghanistan. Andrea Mitchell (NBC News, Washington) interviewed National Security Council chief of staff Denis McDonough this afternoon. She said to him, ‘I gotta ask you about former Vice President Cheney and what he told Politico. Quote: ‘Here’s a guy without much experience who campaigned against much of what we put in place who now travels the world apologizing. I think you’re adversaries, especially when it’s preceded by a deep bow, see that as a sign of weakness.’ Your comments, sir?’
MCDONOUGH: The president’s going to make very clear to the country that we’re committed to this effort, which frankly over the course of eight years was adrift, and I think even if you can go back to as late as, uhh, the early 1990s when, uhh, then Vice President Cheney was the secretary of defense, we made a very, uhh, grave mistake when we walked away from Afghanistan and Pakistan — and, frankly, may have created some of the challenges we face today. So while we’ll make sure that we continue to read about what the vice president has to say on this we’ll also continue to work to make sure that we can pick up the pieces that were left behind.
RUSH: So they’re setting the stage here for Obama’s speech. It’s all about Bush and Cheney, incompetence, going back to the nineties and the first Gulf War. And listen. Do you hear this little egghead’s voice? He’s one of these Ivy League eggheads that pretends to have some knowledge of international affairs. We didn’t walk away from anything over there. Now, you people who are falling prey to this, I’m disappointed so I’m going to have to tell you right up front. I’m disappointed in some of you. I know you’re smarter than this. You’re falling for this third-party stuff and it’s a dangerous route. Ask yourself when one has ever succeeded in advancing conservatism. Can you name me a third party that has succeeded doing that? There hasn’t been one that tried to do that, and there will not be one. The third party is simply a place for you to go and get in a room and with the other people that are all agitated and angry about stuff and start shouting.
That’s all you’re gonna end up accomplishing — and this business that we ran away from Bin Laden at Tora Bora? I have Tommy Franks’ op-ed October 19th, 2004, New York Times: ‘President Bush and Senator John Kerry have very different views of the war on terrorism, and those differences ought to be debated in this presidential campaign. But the debate should focus on facts, not distortions of history. On more than one occasion, Senator Kerry has referred to the fight at Tora Bora in Afghanistan during late 2001 as a missed opportunity for America. He claims that our forces had Osama Bin Laden cornered and allowed him to escape. How did it happen? According to Mr. Kerry, we ‘outsourced’ the job to Afghan warlords,’ and we just had a caller who claims to be an ‘independent’ saying that he read about this in Bob Woodward’s book and saw it on 60 Minutes and so it must be true.
Well, here’s the commanding officer writing about it in the New York Times: ‘As commander of the allied forces in the Middle East, I was responsible for the operation at Tora Bora, and I can tell you that the senator’s understanding of events doesn’t square with reality.’ The Senator’s understanding of events? If I may commentate here, he makes it up as he goes. There’s no understanding of events. These people live in the Universe of Lies! ‘First, take Mr. Kerry’s contention that we ‘had an opportunity to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden’ and that ‘we had him surrounded.’ We don’t know to this day whether Mr. Bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001. Some intelligence sources said he was; others indicated he was in Pakistan at the time; still others suggested he was in Kashmir.
‘Tora Bora was teeming with Taliban and Qaeda operatives, many of whom were killed or captured, but Mr. Bin Laden was never within our grasp. Second, we did not ‘outsource’ military action. We did rely heavily on Afghans because they knew Tora Bora, a mountainous, geographically difficult region on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is where Afghan mujahedeen holed up for years, keeping alive their resistance to the Soviet Union. Killing and capturing Taliban and Qaeda fighters was best done by the Afghan fighters who already knew the caves and tunnels. Third, the Afghans weren’t left to do the job alone. Special forces from the United States and several other countries were there, providing tactical leadership and calling in air strikes.
‘Pakistani troops also provided significant help — as many as 100,000 sealed the border and rounded up hundreds of Qaeda and Taliban fighters.’ Who the hell do people think ended up in all these prisons? ‘Contrary to Senator Kerry, President Bush never ‘took his eye off the ball’ when it came to Osama bin Laden. The war on terrorism has a global focus. It cannot be divided into separate and unrelated wars, one in Afghanistan and another in Iraq. Both are part of the same effort to capture and kill terrorists before they are able to strike America again, potentially with weapons of mass destruction. Terrorist cells are operating in some 60 countries, and the United States, in coordination with dozens of allies, is waging this war on many fronts.’ Anyway the piece goes on and we’ll link to it at RushLimbaugh.com. It’s Tommy Franks writing in the New York Times, an op-ed, October 19th of 2004.
Already today — and I don’t believe that go was independent. I believe we’re getting scammed here by seminar callers from the left, the Universe of Lies, and they’re just following the rule. You know, Politico had the story, we just shared it with you about how all this is orchestrated and how it happens. And now they got their army out calling out this show and others like it, and they’re doing it because they have to cover up for somebody who hasn’t a care in the world how this actually ends up. The president of the United States is doing this speech tonight as a photo-op. He’s doing it as a political necessity. He’s also doing it so he won’t lose his base, and he’s doing it to keep his face by bashing Bush and Cheney again. It’s nothing more complicated than that. It’s no more complicated to understand than asking how the hell two crashers got into the White House.
They’re not crashers. Somebody let ’em in. Nobody gets in that place — nobody gets in that place — if somebody doesn’t want them there. Nobody! And look at who’s being thrown under the bus on 
this. The Secret Service is being thrown under the bus on this. There can be no way. They’re even now saying that a White House office person was not at the checkpoint. If that’s true, why, that’s just… I just don’t believe it! I just don’t believe it. And I know they’ve got the Secret Service by the shorts because the Secret Service can’t go public and say a word about this. So if they say, ‘Yeah, the White House staffer was not there. It can’t be us that let ’em in…’ Be vigilant, folks. Be vigilant. We’re being scammed. We’re being spun. The Universe of Lies has us surrounded. We’re in a little bubble here called The Universe of Reality.
The Universe of Lies is all around us. We’re just one little bubble in it. We’re trying to stay pure and not be corrupted by it. Now, to Obama and his paid hacks on TV today: Tell me — I want to know — how many people has Barack Obama liberated? You say he’s such a great president, that he has such a command of all there foreign policy issues and military issues. How many people has Barack Obama liberated from bondage? Reagan liberated eastern Europe. Reagan liberated Latin America. Bush 43 liberated 50 million Muslims. Obama hasn’t liberated anyone, and he won’t. Barack Obama likes Fidel Castro. He likes Hugo Chavez. He likes the dictators in the Middle East. He bows down to them; he kisses up to them.
Obama has yet to be challenged as Reagan or Bush or most presidents have been challenged. Not yet, anyway. So he and his paid hacks try to diminish those who preceded him in order to try to build Obama up because there is no substance to build up. Obama’s poll numbers are plummeting. The things that he is accomplishing are things the American people now realize they didn’t vote for and do not want. They realize that he’s unpopular, but they don’t care about that. Because right now they don’t think there’s anything we can do to stop it, because we don’t have the votes of opposition in either the House or Senate to stop anything. And you couple that with the arrogance and the conceit — not only of Obama, but of Rahm Emanuel and all the people around him. You have a leadership that is impervious. They don’t even view this as a republic or as a democracy. It’s their country now. They’ve gotten hold of it.
They do realize that it would be best if the American people continued to have wonderful thoughts of Obama, so they try to spin all of this stuff to cover up the fact he really doesn’t care about this. This is just a little annoyance! Afghanistan is just a little annoyance. His focus is on getting out of there. His focus is not on winning. His focus is not on protecting the American people. Contrary to what everybody thinks a commander-in-chief does, because that’s just the way Americans have been raised. We grow up and we have faith in the traditions and institutions that protect us and defend us. I’ll have more on that, by the way, because this swine flu… We may reach a tripping point here — and there are several opportunities to reach a tipping point. The swine flu thing may be one of them where people start to join me in instinctively not trusting government.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: While I have your attention: third party. This third-party stuff has got to stop, folks, unless you are for a third party for the Democrats. I’m all for Ralph Nader running again. I’d love for Howard Dean to get fed up or some other Democrat to get fed up with Obama and I’d love for a third party of Democrats and liberals to establish itself. I want all kinds of liberals to line and up run in third parties. That’s how we weaken their side. As for our side, the focus must be to take back the Republican Party. That’s the way you win. You can draw attention to yourself by denouncing both parties at the same time, and you can think that you’re relating to a whole lot of people or being disabused and forgotten about, but you do a grave disservice in doing so because you’re never going to win anything. You’re going to guarantee Democrat victory in perpetuity. We need a strong conservative movement that takes back the Republican Party and then we have a strong Republican Party. It’s hard work but it is happening.
There is a conservative ascendancy here. Why in the world waste what is happening here with this new conservative ascendance and weaken it and split it up by forming a third party? So far, not a single Republican is going to vote for government-run health care. If the parties were the same the vote would be unanimous, would it not? If the parties were the same, all the Republicans would be on board for this, in the House and the Senate, and they’re not. I think one Republican in the House voted for government-run health care. When cap and trade came up, eight Republicans voted for it. The rest voted against it. In the Senate, all but a couple of Republicans voted against the stimulus bill. If the parties were the same, sweeping majorities, health care would already be the law of the land if the Republican Party was the same as the Democrat Party. There wouldn’t have been any tea parties. We wouldn’t be having to mess around with all these various bills and CBO scores. But, folks, it’s all out in front of your face. It’s right in the middle of your face, right in front of your eyes. The parties are not the same. We need more of this, and you don’t get more of this by insisting that there’s no difference between the parties.
Now, I’m the first to tell you, and I’m the first to agree that the Republican Party has screwed up and it needs to continue to find its legs, and with our help, it will have no choice but to become a traditional conservative party. We don’t have Marxists in our party. We don’t have Maoists leading the charge in our party. Those people have found a home in Obama’s party and government but not in the Republican Party. The problem is that there are people trying to confuse the issue. They’re saying, ‘Well, the Republicans spent too much and they did this and they gave us new entitlements, they spend just like the Democrats, they all spend, they all spend the same.’ I get that. I fought them on those things. I was deeply upset and opposed to a lot of this spending. I had emissaries from the White House sent down here to try to get my mind right on these things. But they are not, as a matter of ideology, the Republicans are not seeking the destruction of capitalism and the private sector. They are not trying to hollow out the military. They are not undermining our intelligence services and so forth.
The Republican Party has lost its way because of one issue: Abortion. The Ivy League Republican-in-name-only so-called moderate Republicans who are truly liberal Republicans do not like the social issue of abortion and other social issues like family values and morality and all that having a role in the party platform. It’s as simple as that. They didn’t like it when Reagan ran the show and was winning big landslides. But they are not Marxists. They are not Maoists. They do not hate the US military. They are not apologizing for the United States of America around the world. Snap out of this! There’s no difference between the two parties. The Republican Party right now has lost its way. This conservative ascendancy can help it find its way. The Democrat Party has found its way, and it’s the radical left way, and that’s who they are now, and they have to be stopped. And they will not be stopped if a third party ends up being the result of this little internecine war in the Republican Party. They will be in power, the Democrats will be in perpetuity if a third party emerges out of our party.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Look, the truth is, folks, that most of us know that the two parties are not the same. We’re hearing a lot from the same people, or thinking that surrounded the Ross Perot effort or the Reform Party effort, more generally. It seems that some people are trying to tap into this group and then claim it represents most conservatives, Libertarians, Republicans, when in fact it doesn’t. Now, we always had populist movements in this country on the left and the right. But we are not populists, we’re constitutionalists, we are conservatives. And when a majority of us are in control of the Republican Party, the Republican Party wins. But it’s not gonna win if there’s a third party.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Back to Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington. She interviewed National Security Council chief of staff Denis McDonough, works for Obama. He’s out there setting the stage for Obama’s West Point speech tonight by trashing Bush and Cheney. She said, ‘Jack Murtha is just back from Afghanistan, and he says, ‘I’m still very nervous about this whole thing. If you had ten years it might work. If you had five years you could make a difference. But you don’t have that long.’ He also mentioned to Politico how do we define victory. How can you make it work and how do you define victory at the White House?’
MCDONOUGH: The bottom line is how we define good enough here is to make sure that there’s not a safe haven for Al-Qaeda to go back to and use to plot against our interests, our allies and even against the homeland here in the United States. So we’re very focused on exactly that.
RUSH: What kind of leaders won’t define victory? We’re kind of focused on, we decided good enough here to make sure that there’s not a safe haven for Al-Qaeda to go to. That’s what’s good enough. There’s a story I have here, it’s the Wall Street Journal combined with another story. The number of private sector people who are in the Obama cabinet is lower than any administration in decades. It’s just striking. And this guy’s obviously one of these eggheads from the Ivy League. Here it is. And the Wall Street Journal has a companion story to it: ‘White House Business Leaders Split on How to Create Jobs.’ By the way, the big jobs summit is coming up on Thursday. ‘The Obama administration and US business leaders will meet at the White House this week.’ Now, remember, Obama said this is not about job creation. The jobs summit is not about job creation. Afghanistan is not about victory.
Anyway, ‘The Obama administration and US business leaders will meet at the White House this week to ponder ways to boost employment. Their ideas, though, don’t overlap much. Businesses of all sizes are brimming with proposals they say would spur economic growth. The most commonly voiced are tax cuts and boosting access to credit. The White House, for its part, wants to discuss job growth in the clean-tech sector and shifting some stimulus spending to infrastructure projects,’ which I thought that was the original purpose, infrastructure projects. I thought that’s what it was all about. See, the stimulus is just a slush fund which I’m going to put in perspective here in just a second for you. TARP is just a slush fund, and this is how they intend to get past any poll problems on Election Day for Democrats.
‘A 10.2% jobless rate, the worst since 1982, is emerging as the administration’s biggest domestic challenge, a threat to the weak economic recovery and Democrats’ hold on Congress. But many of the nostrums floated by business would increase spending or reduce tax receipts, unpalatable moves for the White House as the nation’s huge deficit becomes a political liability.’ One way you could close the deficit and reduce it is to lower taxes. That happens to work every time it’s tried. At any rate, there’s a chart here from J.P. Morgan research. ‘It examines the prior private sector experience of the cabinet officials since 1900 that one might expect a president to turn to in seeking advice about helping the economy. It includes secretaries of State, Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Energy, and Housing & Urban Development, and excludes Postmaster General, Navy, War, Health, Education & Welfare, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security — 432 cabinet members in all.’
The percentage of cabinet appointments in the Obama administration who have private sector experience is 8%. Under George W. Bush, it was 55%. Under Clinton, about 37%. Under George H.W. Bush, about 52%. Under Reagan, 58%. Eisenhower, 59%. Kennedy, about 30%. LBJ, about 46%. Nixon, 53%. Carter, about 30. Obama, 8%. ‘When one considers that public sector employment has ranged since the 1950s at between 15 percent and 19 percent of the population, the makeup of the current cabinet — over 90 percent of its prior experience was in the public sector — is remarkable.’ Only 8% of the 432 cabinet members in the Obama administration have any kind of private sector experience. So this is what I meant earlier when I said that the Democrat Party has found its way, and they’re using it, they’re on their way, this is a bunch of people who have had disdain for the private sector, they blame it for all of the ills and the immorality and the discrimination and the inequality and the unfairness, and they look at themselves as the only people who can bring fairness, equality, nondiscrimination, and all of that, because they know better. They’re smart people. They’re the good people. They know much better than we do, and we’re seeing what happens when you have people who have no respect for, no love for and no experience in the private sector.