RUSH: You gotta be kidding me. We’re gonna send — (interruption) You gotta be kidding me. (interruption) For real? Seriously? (interruption) We’re gonna send the National Guard to Liberia now? We’re gonna send more troops. NBC just said we’re gonna send the National Guard to Liberia to fight Ebola?
Greetings, my friends, and welcome. Great to have you. Rush Limbaugh, and yet another excursion into broadcast excellence hosted by me, show prep for the rest of the media.
Man-oh-man, out of the clear blue, did I ever have a See, I Told You So yesterday with the monologue in my second hour. This is overwhelming even to me. And I’ll get to that in just a second. But, man, the National Guard. Am I reading this right? Let me click on this here, folks. “Obama May Send National Guard to Liberia to Fight Ebola.” The source is NBC News.
“President Barack Obama is expected to issue an executive order Thursday paving the way for the deployment of National Guard forces to Liberia to help contain the Ebola outbreak there.” (interruption) Well, that’s a good point. Are they gonna fly commercial or are they gonna go charter? Some of the things that Thomas Frieden said between the end of the yesterday’s program and today are mind-bogglingly confusing. (interruption) See, that’s just it. I didn’t know you could shoot Ebola.
I’m gonna tell you what this is. They’ve got to try to maintain some sense of confidence in the American people before the election. All of this is about the election. So you’ve got Frieden out there saying, “No, we gotta contain it in Africa. We gotta contain it in Africa,” which is what he’s saying. We have to contain it in Africa. That’s their buzzword. We’ve got to contain it there.
Okay, well, then why don’t you ban flights?
Oh, no, we cannot isolate countries. That wouldn’t be fair, because, you see, the United States is no different than any other nation in the world now. Everything’s global and we’re no different than anywhere else. There’s nothing particularly special, nothing unique. The fact that he’s the president of the United States doesn’t mean anything. He’s president of the world. And we are just part of the world, pure and simple. And so the thought process does not even include — I can’t go that far. I mean, this is just absurd. There is no Ebola vaccine. (interruption) I don’t know. Look, you’re asking me how are the troops gonna be safe? I haven’t the slightest idea. You would assume the purpose of the troops is to contain the populations in Africa where Ebola is — (interruption) Well, I understand, look, I understand all that.
Don’t talk common sense to me because none of this features any common sense. You’re asking me to address this rationally. (interruption) I know, if the troops come in contact with people that have the disease blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We’re even getting more contradictory statements on how the disease is spread today. It’s a mess, it literally is a mess. Let me stick with Frieden here, because I think the reason we’re sending troops is because what everybody in this Regime wants you to think. The solution here is containing this in Africa, but that’s not what they’re doing.
If the solution is to contain it in Africa, then you ban flights from Africa to the United States. But you can’t do that. That wouldn’t be fair. That wouldn’t be right for one nation of the world to treat another nation of the world that way. That’s not nice. That’s not fair. That’s us acting too big for our britches. That’s us acting more important than they are, and we’re not more important. They and we are all citizens of the world, and there’s no delineation or distinction. So Frieden says we got to contain the disease in Africa. And then somebody says, “Well, okay, let’s ban flights.” No. We can’t ban flights from Africa. That would spread the disease. And that is what he says, essentially.
On the one hand we have to contain the disease in Africa. On the other hand, when we offer ways of doing that, they’re all rejected, such as banning flights. So I’m telling you, this idea of sending troops over there is to create an image, is to create a picture that we are containing the disease in Africa and we are using the all-powerful United States military, which still has an uncorrupted reputation. Everything else in this Regime has been corrupted, is distrusted to one degree or another. The military still isn’t. Obama can still go to it and fall back on it, send National Guard troops along with the 3,000 or 4,000 other troops.
You’re not supposed to ask, “What are they gonna do?’
You’re not supposed to ask, “How does this contain the disease in Africa?”
Forgive me here, folks, but what authority does the US military have in, say, Liberia to tell citizens there where they can and can’t go? Are we doing this in conjunction, cooperation with their governments? So the military, the National Guard, we can’t contain ISIS on the ground in Syria. We cannot contain ISIS on the ground in Iraq. But we’re gonna contain a virus in Liberia and in Sierra Leone and in Nigeria, and we’re gonna contain sick Africans, ’cause that’s what this means, contain sick Africans.
But it’s too late. The only reasonable thing to do is to ban travel into United States from outbreak countries, and they’re just not gonna do that.
Now, this Frieden guy, the Centers for Disease Control guy, this stuff that we’ve learned with the nurse, the second nurse. So he will allow a feverish nurse, a nurse with 99.8 degree fever because she’s not at the 101 threshold, so she’s not symptomatic. He will allow — get this. I want to put this in perspective for you. The director of the Centers for Disease Control will allow a feverish nurse who is carrying the virus to fly on a commercial flight between Dallas and Cleveland, but he will not stop flights to and from Ebola stricken nations, and he will not allow New Yorkers to drink large soft drinks or eat salt or trans fats because that’s a public health crisis. Is something out of proportion?
This is the guy who implemented all of these crazy diet restrictions in New York City for Mayor Bloomberg. This is the guy behind the smoking ban outside, in a cave, anywhere, because it kills. This is the guy behind, you can’t buy anything bigger than 16 ounces that has Coke or Pepsi or 7-Up in it ’cause it will kill you, too much sugar. And you can’t eat trans fats because that’s a killer. So all of these restrictions on things like smoking and eating and drinking, and no restrictions on Ebola patients traveling to and from this country. Would someone try to explain that to me?
No, I know, I know, I know, the nurse is now being dumped on. The nurse is being blamed for lying to the CDC about her condition. Let me ask you, are you able to keep up with all of this? Let me do my best to synthesize this for you as of this moment. The news overnight was that nurse Amber Vinson got permission from the CDC to fly from Cleveland to Dallas back on Monday. In fact, Ms. Vinson called the CDC several times. Apparently even she couldn’t believe the CDC was giving her permission to get on a plane.
She called them. We didn’t know this yesterday. She called them. She described her condition. She asked for permission to go. She’s getting married and she wanted to get some things done on the ceremony. They let her go and she couldn’t believe it. Now, anyway, Ms. Vinson told them she had a temperature of 99.5 degrees and yet they said it was okay for her to take that flight, because apparently the cutoff point for Ebola, according to the CDC, is 100.4 degrees. So if it’s 99.5, it may not be Ebola, 99.8, 99.9, 100 might not be Ebola. But 100.4, bingo, Ebola. She was less than one degree below that cutoff of 100.4, never mind her thermometer might not have been precisely accurate.
“Hey, nurse Vinson, you’re nine-tenths of a degree under the limit, go ahead and fly.”
Now, let’s keep in mind of something here. When Thomas Duncan first went to the ER in Dallas, he had a temperature of only six-tenths of a degree higher than nurse Vinson’s. His temperature, I know these numbers get hard to follow but, I mean, the point is that contradictory protocols or whatever you call ’em are all over the place. When Duncan first went to the ER his temperature was only sixth tenths of a degree higher than nurse Vinson’s. In other words, his temperature was not even one degree higher.
His temperature at the time was 100.1 degrees. Hers was 99.5 on the plane. And yet the fact that Duncan was not immediately recognized as having Ebola is now considered to be the crime of the century. Everybody, “How do they not know? A guy walks in, he says he’s from Liberia, got this fever, how could they not know?” Even though Duncan’s temperature didn’t reach the CDC’s 100.4 degree Ebola cutoff, either. That’s the point. The Ebola cutoff is 100.4. If you have that or more they won’t let you fly and they’re thinking you may have Ebola, given every other circumstance out there. But Duncan wasn’t showing 100.4 when he first showed up. He was showing 100.1.
In any case, John Roberts at Fox News is tweeting that the CDC is telling him that Nurse Vinson lied to them. It’s time now to dump on the nurse again. This is the second nurse that they’re dumping on, right? That they’re pulling the wheels out from under, they’re throwing overboard, if you will. John Roberts at Fox tweeting that the Centers for Disease Control is telling him that Nurse Vinson lied to them when she called to get permission to take the flight back to Dallas from Cleveland.
John Roberts says the CDC is claiming that Nurse Vinson did not tell them how sick she was, including the fact that she had been too ill to meet with her bridesmaids. Remember, she went back there to deal with wedding planning. So now it’s Ms. Vinson’s turn in the tank. I told you yesterday that somebody was gonna be scapegoated here. At some point they’re gonna have to scapegoat Frieden. (interruption) No, he called. The first story was she called to get permission. She wanted clarification. And I guess from that we can assume she was trying to do the right thing. Is that what you would think? She was trying to do the right thing, “Look, I’ve got a fever, is it okay for me to come back? I want to fly.”
“What’s your temperature?”
“My temperature is 99.5.”
“Ah, fine and dandy, you gotta be 100.4 for a problem, so sure, get on a plane.”
She did what they said, and now they’re telling us that she lied to them, that she was sicker than she let on.