And it resulted in a truly softball interview with Chris “Cooomo” — as his last name is pronounced by the Reverend Jackson — and Hillary.  When did it happen?  It happened yesterday.  Actually, Wolf Blitzer’s show — where was Wolf?  Guess he’s en route to Egypt.  They found an oil slick now.  They found baggage, luggage. They have found wreckage.

The reason that people are a little bit curious here, the reason those who are reluctant to call it terrorism are reluctant to call it terrorism is that a terror group has not claimed credit.  And that is the purpose of terrorism, is to claim credit, tell everybody you did it, as a means of terrifying them.

Now, in this case, I don’t think anybody needs to claim credit for a majority of people to realize this incident is going to further bottleneck airport security.  Whether this was terrorism or not, the authorities are gonna take advantage of the occasion of this to slap on even more security procedures.  But a lot of people say, “Airplanes don’t just fall out of the sky.”  You had three air marshals on this plane.  Airplane engines don’t just quit.  They just don’t.  Now, a lot of people have fear that they’re going to, but they don’t.

You know the amazing thing about airplane travel is how overwhelmingly safe it is?  I don’t think people stop to think how many flights every day there are carrying how many millions of people traveling how many, what, billions of miles.  The number of legitimate aircraft accidents is so small that it is one of the safest public endeavors in the world today.  Airplane engines just don’t quit.  You might hear a story here or there of a jet losing an engine. You don’t even hear that, but this is a twin-engine.  It’s an A320.  Airplanes just don’t lose both of their engines.  Single-engine prop plane, the engines, they just don’t stop.  I mean, in the past they did.

I’m talking about the technology has gotten so good, that that’s not why airplanes are brought down, engine failure.  There’s usually something like a bird strike in an engine, for example, or a lightning strike, midair collision, but the airplane malfunctioning is just not something that happens with any kind of regularity.  I mean, it’s so rare when something like that happens that people can’t remember the last time.  So that’s why the natural tendency to think that it was brought down by an explosion or a missile or what have you.  And if you take a look at — let’s say the engines did stop, let’s say that that is what happened, there’s no way the airplane would have taken the course that it took if the engines just died.

It would immediately go to a glide pattern, the pilots would do everything they could to use the glide slope that the plane has, and every airplane has a glide slope or rate of descent.  Some glide better than others.  The shuttle, for example, the space shuttle, I don’t know how many people know this, the space shuttle returned from outer space hundred plus miles high with no power, with absolutely no engines.  They can’t.  The heat of reentry would explode the shuttle.  They come back, they jettison all the fuel on launch. And then whatever positioning fuel they have to pitch and roll and yaw the shuttle while in space, that’s pretty much all there is.  But it’s not enough to control the flight of the shuttle once it hits the atmosphere.

The glide slope of the shuttle is the equivalent to a rock.  The way you measure a glide path is how many feet does it drop per feet it advances.  And some aircraft, like single-engine Cessnas, single-engine Piper’s have amazing glide slopes and glide paths and glide quite a great distance.  The heavier the aircraft, obviously, the less the glide slope’s gonna be.  But this jet would have one.  It’s gonna drop like a rock.  I’m not saying it could continuing operating as though it had power because they wouldn’t have any hydraulics if the engine quit, you couldn’t steer it, but there isn’t anything up there aerodynamically that would cause it to veer and plummet and do a 360 in the air like it did if all that happened was the engines quitting.

So Mrs. Clinton’s out there being very, very, very reasonable and very, very restrained and very, very, very moderate about this.  Meanwhile, Trump says it’s terrorism, we’re never gonna beat these people, we keep losing to them. “When I become president it’s not gonna happen anymore.”

“How dare he?  You can’t talk that way, you can’t. It’s just gonna make them madder.  And, besides, what if they didn’t do it, it’s false allegation.”  It’s fear and panic all over.  Let’s go to the audio sound bites and listen to Mrs. Clinton on this at CNN.  Yesterday afternoon, Wolf Blitzer show hosted by Chris Cuomo, and this is a montage of questions, just to illustrate the softball questions that Hillary got yesterday.

CUOMO:  What is your message, and what do you believe the response should be to make something like this less likely? … Do you believe that things are worse now than they were seven, eight years ago? … How do you fight the perception that we look weak? … Do you think that Donald Trump is qualified to be president? … Why don’t you reach out directly to Senator Sanders?  … Should you reach out to Bernie Sanders? … Any thought to your making the first move? … Do you ever feel compelled to defend your honor, the honor of your husband? … What do you bring against Donald Trump ’cause you know what he’s bringing against you. … You talked about your grandkids and you talked about your mother. … What do you think when you think about your mother and the inspiration about how you get up?

RUSH:  What does she think about when she thinks about how her father abused her, or her father was a tyrant.  What else can it be?  Her father was a typical male predator type.  This question here, “Do you ever feel compelled to defend your honor, the honor your husband?”  You know how she answered that?  “No.”  She said “no.”  When asked during a CNN interview if she felt compelled to defend, quote, “your honor, the honor of your husband,” she said no.  Of course she would say now.  How can she?  What is she going to say?  Juanita Broaddrick is out there alleging that Bill Clinton raped her, and Trump has referenced that on the Fox News Channel.  And so it’s out there.

Numerous Drive-Bys like, what’s her name, Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington, are saying it’s never been conclusively proved.  It’s been debunked.  And of course it hasn’t.  NBC News did the definitive interview with Juanita Broaddrick.  It was Lisa Myers.  And it was never discredited.  Quite the contrary.  But not even wanting to go there, I think it’s quite telling.  Do you think Trump would react that way if there were similar allegations about him or somebody in his family?  So, anyway, those are the softball questions that she got, which is not surprising.  I just wanted to illustrate them to you.  Here is Hillary answering the question whether or not Trump is qualified to be president.

HILLARY:  No, I do not.  And I think the kinds of positions he is stating and the consequences of those positions, and even the consequences of his statements are not just offensive to people; they are potentially dangerous.

CUOMO:  How so?

HILLARY:  When you say we’re gonna bar all Muslims, you are sending a message to the Muslim world, and you’re also sending a message to the terrorists, because we now do have evidence, we have seen how Donald Trump is being used to essentially be a recruiter for more people to join the cause of terrorism.

RUSH:  You know, this gets to the old rub. This is this kind of thing I think needs to be refuted until everybody believes it.  Trump nor any other critic of militant Islam, Trump nor any other critic of terrorism, creates terrorists.  What creates terrorists is Islam.  Sharia.  It’s in the book.  What creates terrorists is the imams in the mosques in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.  Trump’s not creating terrorists.  George W. Bush did not create terrorists.

These people on the left like Hillary Clinton are out there trying to say that Guantanamo Bay and the pictures at Abu Ghraib from Iraq, they just make these young Muslim men so angry that they joined up and they want to become terrorists and so forth.  And it’s nonsense, and it’s typical of the left, people like that, being unable to correctly assign responsibility to the people who deserve it.

So Mrs. Clinton says that Trump is not qualified to be president because the kinds of positions that he states and the consequences of those positions and even the consequences of his statements are not just offensive to people; they’re potentially dangerous.

Okay.  Well, let’s go back, January 23rd 2013, Capitol Hill, a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the Benghazi consulate attacks, Hillary’s testifying.  Senator Ron Johnson, Republican, Wisconsin, says, “We were misled that there were supposedly protests and an assault sprang out of that” — at Benghazi — “and that was easily ascertained that that was not the fact.  The American people could have known that within days, and they didn’t know that.”

He’s talking about the fact that for the longest time the Regime said it was a video, that an internet video that nobody ever saw incited a mob. It got everybody over there so mad that a spontaneous protest sprung up.  We found out that it was never the video and it was not a spontaneous protest.  It was a planned terror attack which this administration has since admitted was the case.

But this is January 23rd, Ron Johnson is essentially was saying, “You said it was a video. We know it’s not a video. We know it’s not a spontaneous terror attack at Benghazi, it was planned, and we’ve known this.  And we’ve known this a long time, Mrs. Clinton. The American people could have known within days and they didn’t because they were lied to by you and others in the administration.  What do you say to that?”

HILLARY:  With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans.

JOHNSON:  I understand.

HILLARY:  Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans?  What difference, at this point, does it make?

RUSH:  That’s so presidential, I’m sitting here in awe.  What difference, at this point, does it make?  What difference it makes is that you are part of an administration that couldn’t tell anybody the truth about what happened.  Four Americans died in Benghazi that perhaps could have been saved had anybody in Washington been paying attention and not looking at this event as having a damaging impact on the upcoming election in 2012.

“With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Johnson says, “I understand.”  “Was it because of a protest, bunch of guys out for a walk, what difference does it make?”  What difference does it make?  That’s presidential?  That’s supposed to assure us?  That’s supposed to remind us of the sterling qualities that Mrs. Clinton has?  Count me out.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  So Hillary Clinton wants to be president of the United States.  I want you to imagine something.  Imagine where you work.  Something goes wrong where you work that you are in charge of.  It does not become known to your superiors for a month or two that something went wrong.  But what went wrong was really bad, and it was under your control, it was under your supervision, in your part of the company.  Management finds out about it a couple months later.

Well, let’s make it even more precise.  What goes wrong is known immediately, but why it went wrong is not known.  And you lie to your superiors about what went wrong.  You claim that what went wrong that resulted in real damage to the company, you lie to your superiors about it.  And you lie to the board of directors.  You blame some outside event, some set of circumstances that nobody had any control over, and it just happened.  And then, two months later, your boss realizes that you’d lied and that the original excuse you offered to explain what went terribly wrong is no longer true.  And, in fact, your boss learns that you lied about it.

So your boss calls you in and asks you to explain all this.  And your answer to your boss is, “What difference does it make?  It happened a couple months ago.  Who cares why it happened?  It was really bad, and it’s really bad now, and who cares why it.”  Do you think you’d be promoted in that company?  You think your boss would accept that explanation from you?  “Who cares.  What difference does it make now?  What difference does it make anymore?  What happened is really bad.”  You’d be finished.

You might not be fired, but you would be static.  At whatever position you hold, you wouldn’t be promoted.  That would be the end of you.  You would have been caught lying after two months of getting away with it.  What went wrong was something directly related to your incompetence, and then you lied to cover it up like Hillary did about Benghazi, continuing to lie about a video, when the video had nothing to do with it, she continued to lie and said it was a spontaneous protest, had nothing to do with it. It was a planned terror attack that Hillary knew and Obama knew was in the cards.

Now, if you, in a certain circumstance, in a business — I’m not talking about where people died, but where something very, very bad for the company happens, and it’s your fault, you did it, and you lie about it, and then you’re caught two months later and your excuse to the boss is, “What difference does it make now?” you’re finished.  Mrs. Clinton wants to be president of the United States.  And she claims Donald Trump is not presidential.

“What difference does it make now?” would not fly with a boss after a colossal mistake, so why should it fly with us?  Why should it fly, why should Hillary’s excuse, “What difference does it make?  What difference does it make why?” you’d be frozen in place at your job.  Why does she deserve to be elected president with that kind of excuse-making?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We grab a phone call the first hour on Open Line Friday, we try, and we’re gonna do so today.  Here’s Mark in Clovis, California.  Great to have you on the program, sir.  Hello.

CALLER:  Great to be here Rush.  First-time caller, first time trying to call.  I feel very lucky.

RUSH:  Congratulations, sir.  You made it through.

CALLER:  Yes.  My point is this.  I heard your opening a little bit this morning.  Hillary claims that Trump’s comment banning Muslims and things like Guantanamo Bay promotes jihadi recruitment and should be eliminated.  But does not progressive initiatives such as transgender bathrooms, gay marriage, extreme feminism also promote radical recruitment?  And shouldn’t we ask Hillary if we should eliminate those ideas and initiatives because they are recruitment tools?

RUSH:  You know, that’s actually a good point, and it’s something people don’t think about very much because to do so would really slice and dice the leftist agenda.  But what his point basically is, if you look at Sharia law, none, very little of what the left wants to call normal is permitted.  You go to Saudi Arabia, homosexuals, if they’re discovered, are beheaded, they are murdered, they are executed.

Remember Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, used to be the head honcho in Iran, came to the United Nations for a meeting one year, was invited to speak to the student body at Columbia.  He spoke and during the Q&A some student stood up and said, “How do you treat your gay population in Iran?”  And Ahmadinejad said, “We don’t have any.”  And the audience started chuckling.  They didn’t get it.  “We don’t have any of that,” he said, “in Iran.”  And the audience started chuckling.  And Ahmadinejad, “Oh, am I wrong?  Do you know any?  If you do, could you tell me who they are?”

And the room got a little quiet. There was still some chuckles, but Mark’s point here, it’s a good one.  I mean, if Sharia is what it is and Islam is what it is and we are infidels, then all the reasons we are infidels is all it would take to anger them. And I’ll guarantee you at least half of the Democrat Party liberal agenda does not float the boat of militant Islam.

Can I giving you another illustration?  I was just looking for it in the Stack of Stuff, and I thought I printed it, and maybe I did and I just can’t find it in the right Stack.  But the United Nations is convening a summit on AIDS.  The United Nations is convening a summit on AIDS, and Islamic member nations have forbidden any homosexuals to attend or be part of it.  And not a peep out of anybody.  Not a peep.

So the UN’s gonna have some seminar, some latest in medical advances or what have you, on AIDS, and the Islamic member nations attending this thing said, “Okay, well, no homosexuals permitted.”  So I just cite that as a backup here to Mark’s point.