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Published January 14, 2015
This is a rush transcript from "Glenn Beck," December 30, 2009. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
ERIC BOLLING, GUEST HOST: President Obama calling the near successful bombing of the U.S. flight on Christmas Day a, quote, "systemic failure" and ordering a preliminary report on the incident by tomorrow.
Are some politicizing this attack?
Here's Ann Coulter, author of "Guilty: Liberal Victims and Their Assault on America" available now in paperback. And Andrew Breitbart, publisher at BigGovernment.com and Breitbart.com.
Ann, let me start with you. Political correctness, can't we all just get along? It gets people killed, does it not?
ANN COULTER, AUTHOR, "GUILTY": Yes. And that's why Democrats don't want us talking about their foreign policy. I mean, this is a major difference between the way the two parties approach foreign policy as described in some detail in my book "Treason."
Liberals think we can get the world to like us and particularly with Obama. That was a big selling point, mentioned about him when he was running. Since he's been president, he's running around the world apologizing for the U.S., allowing the shah to come to power in Iran, for example, pulling missiles out of — out of Europe to satisfy the Russians.
He thinks he can have the same effect on America's enemies as he does on MSNBC hosts, and Republicans have been screaming from the rooftops, you can't force people to like you but you can force them to fear you. And I think it's not a surprise that we've already had, in his first year in office, three terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.
I don't think there was one — there were a bunch of them right after 9/11 under President Bush. There were the D.C. and Virginia snipers. There was Richard Reid. There was the attack on El Al out in — at LAX Airport.
But then it was pretty quiet on American soil for the next six years.
Certainly, when we invaded Iraq, it wasn't just a talking point to say we want to fight them there rather than here. The Democrats come in, change the foreign policy, and we see what results.
BOLLING: All right. Breitbart, you know what it gets me? It gets me when he calls it — when the president calls it an isolated incident. It gets me right here, and then I hear an alleged attack. Hey, 300 people were on that plane. I would venture a guess that they don't think it was alleged. I think there — that that was an actual attack. You know, and then he goes on and on and on — attempted attacks.
What about the way the Obama administration is characterizing this attack?
ANDREW BREITBART, PUBLISHER, BIGGOVERNMENT.COM: Well, if this had been a homegrown terrorist, if this had been another Timothy McVeigh, they would have pointed to the first thing that the Department of Homeland Security had pointed out months ago that Sarah Palin's rolodex is the thing we should fear in this country. That if militia members are the bad guys out there.
So, when we talk about political correctness, we have to understand that it's a selective politically expedient brand of political correctness, where only Americans and red state Americans are looked upon — are to be looked upon suspiciously.
Since 9/11, Barack Obama and the MoveOn.org left has tried to do everything in coordination with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a very small group that acts as if it represents the entire Muslim-American community, in terms of trying to keep America not safe from radical Islam and radical jihad.
BOLLING: Well, you know, Ann, the left — the far left is saying, "Hey, this is the Republicans. This is the conservatives who are making too much out of this, making too much hay out of this." Are they right?
COULTER: Only in the sense of making too much out of an incident, as you describe it, 100 percent factually. But, like I say, they just want to prevent us from talking at all. I mean, this is the government. So, of course, talking about anything the government does is politicizing it.
BOLLING: Andrew, you and I spoke earlier. You know, it does sound a lot like — a lot of these accusations sound a lot familiar from the incidents past.
BREITBART: Well, Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the primary because she supported the Iraq war, and the MoveOn.org left, its primary talking point and Barack Obama's — one of his primary motivations was arguing that Bush did not protect us from 9/11, that there was a 7 1/2 month period in which Bush didn't change the system.
And one of the main arguments was — and again, this was before 9/11, before we recognized the degree to which radical Islam is a threat to the United States — passing Condoleezza Rice's desk was some intelligence that showed that weapons — that planes could be used as weapons. And I heard that excuse by the left about 5,322 times that we have to get rid of George Bush because he did not protect us because he had this information.
And we are finding out that the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, and the — and President Obama do not have their acts together, and that they promised that they would keep us safe, unlike they claim that Bush didn't. And they're in the same position that they found — that they put Bush in right now.
BOLLING: Ann, let me just talk to you about this for a second.
Since Obama has been in office June 2009, the Little Rock soldier was killed, August 2009; U.S. citizen born in Brooklyn, he's going to fight for the Taliban; in September, Talib Islam born Michael Finton wants to go fight for the Taliban; the Zazi brothers in Denver, they want to blow up the New York City subway; Nidal Hasan, the Army major at Fort Hood; and then this attack on Christmas.
You know, these incidences have definitely stepped up in the last 11 months.
COULTER: Right, I think they have. And that isn't a very long time for three actual attacks on U.S. soil. And I think the point is, these are two competing ideologies of how you deal with our enemies. And if anything, I mean — I mean, they kept using it as a selling point that
Obama would throw Islamic radicals on their hind legs when they look up and they see someone who studies with madrassas and they see the "Great Satan" has a president with a brown face and the world is going to love us.
Well, that clearly has not come to be the case. And moreover, you know, he is in a position even stronger than George Bush to do what ought to be done and that is to start looking for passengers who look like the last three dozen terrorists to attack airplanes. He could engage in — whatever you want to call it — racial profiling, ethnic profiling, looking for young Muslim males, foreign-born Muslim males. But no, to the contrary, what we have is his homeland security coming out and saying the system works.
BOLLING: Andrew, you're in the west coast. Are feelings changing a little bit? It's been a liberal left coast for a long, now they see all these attacks and potential attacks going on. Is the sentiment changing?
BREITBART: In Hollywood — well, look, the thing is, what's happened over the last few years in Hollywood and as being a critic of Hollywood at large, I have to make an apology to the FOX audience because, for years, I thought it was a monolithically left-centered town. It's not. There are tons of right-of-center libertarian-leaning conservatives. It's just that there's a certain Stalinist bent to leftist where if a person were to peep, a conservative peep were to comes out of a Jon Voight, these people are merciless in getting rid of them.
There are a ton of people who would love to make movies that portray the threat of terrorism, to use Hollywood like Hollywood was used in World War II, to be part of the war effort, but Hollywood continues to still make anti-war movies at a time of war even with Obama in power.
BOLLING: Ann, what — is it going to take a successful attack where, you know, a lot more Americans die for the sentiment to change? I mean, this whole, you know, it's a culture. This whole culture has to change.
It has to be more — hey, we better err on the side of safety, because if we don't, people die. If we err on the side of political correctness, people's feelings get hurt, right?
COULTER: Right. Right, well, I happen to think sentiment has changed. Maybe it didn't need to change. I think if you polled Americans after 9/11, they would have said drop the political correctness when it comes to boarding airplanes.
And like I say, Obama can be doing more than Bush. He is specially situated that way, as having gone to madrassas as a child, not being a white male, which is, you know, the height of political incorrectness, but just the contrary, we're moving in exactly doing the — making — repeating the worst mistakes of the Bush administration.
The response to this attack is — is for Obama to take the bull's move, not to allow people to read magazines for the last hour of a flight, not to go to the bathroom for the last hour of a flight. I mean, the way of objective of airport security seems to be to just make it more and more unpleasant for Americans to fly and to make it easier and easier for radical Muslims to fly to the point that now they're talking about doing these full nude body scans for everyone boarding an airplane.
BOLLING: And, Andrew, Ann makes a good point. Have they won? Have they won? If they haven't won the war, has Al Qaeda won a small battle just making, you know, our lives miserable every time we step into an airport?
BREITBART: Well, I think they won after 9/11 when we didn't take seriously the threat. And I think that is, to a great extent, George Bush was a politically correct conservative. He didn't want to offend anyone, and so, people are more in touch with bad environmental information. Children at schools will know more about the mythical climate change than they know about the number one threat to Western civilization in our time, which is radical Islam.
BOLLING: All right. You know, Ann, I was doing a show yesterday and I said, "Hey, you know, what about releasing these guys from Gitmo, and they end up being part of the terror plot on Christmas Day?" And the answer to me from the left was, "Yes, well, you know, they were released under George Bush." And I said, "Listen, it doesn't matter when they were released. It matters what happens now."
What's going now with Gitmo? Do we just let these guys go?
COULTER: No. I mean, talk about politicizing something in a way that
I think doesn't particularly benefit Democrats, I think the Bush administration can be criticized, and certainly was by me for the airport security procedures, and for releasing too many detainees at Guantanamo.
We already knew, and many of us were writing about the three or four dozen Gitmo detainees released who went right back to jihad. Some were recaptured. Some were killed on the battlefield.
We were releasing too many from Guantanamo. So, that's a legitimate criticism, but not from the Democrats because they want to release everybody from Guantanamo.
BOLLING: What about it, Andrew, do they have — do they have an argument that some were released under Bush?
BREITBART: Well, I wanted to make point about Guantanamo Bay. My Web site, Big Government broke the story about Guantanamo prisoners who are going to be sent to Illinois, if it's four days for the White House to announce the memo that we had was, in fact, real.
The problem here, and I think the problem here, and think that President Obama needs to be straight with the American people, when we reported this, the decision had been made to transfer them to Illinois, weeks in advance. Weeks after that memo came out, there was a planned town hall meeting where they were supposedly going to speak with the American people about what to do with the Gitmo detainees. It was — it was created as window-dressing. The decision had been made.
President Obama needs to move behind — from behind political correctness and window-dressing and be straight with the American people.
BOLLING: An, you know, this — you know, spending three days in
Hawaii before making a statement, six minutes long, coming back the following day making another statement, really seems like I'm too — just trying to portray this cool, calm, collected president, when a lot of people, frankly are e-mailing me going, "Get out there, let us know what's going on, let us know if we're safe to fly."
Am I wrong?
COULTER: Well, yes, but I again, I say it's particularly in the case of a Democratic president, and this Democratic president, in particular. I mean, this is why the attacks on George Bush for FEMA not performing properly at Katrina had political resonance.
You look at the Democratic attack on Republicans that they don't care about the poor. And the Republican attack on Democrats — I think legitimate — is that they don't care about national defense.
I mean, however long it takes — it takes a president to come out and comment on something like that, you didn't have any fear that George Bush wasn't willing to send terrorists to secret prisons, to put them in Guantanamo, to waterboard them. We know this president won't do that and doesn't do that and wants to shut down Guantanamo. They're all whining about waterboarding.
And with his homeland security secretary saying so inanely that even the mainstream media noticed this, that the system works after all that happened was, you know, a Dutchman on the same plane put out the smoldering Nigerian. To say the system worked — no, no, no, the system will not have worked until Janet Napolitano is fired.
BOLLING: Andrew, you know, next month, I think in January, we have three Navy SEALs who are going up — they're going to go to trial and trying not to be court-martialed for punching a terrorist, a guy who we've known has killed up to four Americans and four contractors, punching them in the stomach, giving them a stomachache, and then this happens. Where are we? Where are we on this?
BREITBART: That's two sides of the same coin of political correctness. We can say it over and over, political correctness, political correctness — it is our enemy at a time of war, because at the same time we're trying to apologize and appease radical Islam, saying that you're not the enemy, when, in fact, radical Islam is the enemy, we're trying to send them the message that we're going to be overly tough on those within our ranks to show you again we're good people. We're democratic people. We're fair-minded and we adhere to human rights.
If you look into radical Islam, they don't care about human rights. They care about pushing the religion and creating a new Caliphate.
BOLLING: All right. Andrew Breitbart, Ann Coulter — thank you very much. Have a great New Year.
BREITBART: Thanks.
COULTER: Happy New Year.
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