RUSH: I got this note. We were talking last week about jet fuel, and it was in the context of the aviation business and all the new airplanes that are being built and designed and all the new airplanes being bought, how much jet fuel they use. I don’t know that a lot of people have a grasp of how much fuel one big jumbo jet uses. So Mark Hasara, who was the chief of the Air Refueling Control Team during Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom sent me a note. He says, ‘We got a call late in the Iraqi war asking how much…’ He uses ‘gas’ here for the term, but this is jet fuel. By the way, some military jets use a combination of Jet A and gas, so just think fuel here. ‘We got a call late in the Iraqi war asking how much gas we had off-loaded out of Air Force tankers. The KC-10 and the plane I flew, the KC-135. As of the 5th of April, on that date in the Iraq war, we had off-loaded 417,233,000 pounds of gas to 28,783 coalition fighters in 58,834 tanker missions.
As a way of illustrating, the moon’s what, 240 million miles up there, or out there? So the 417 million pounds that we had off-loaded to 28,783 coalition fighters, that fuel would allow someone to make 1,037 round trips to the Moon in a Ford F-150. Mark says, ‘I know this because some newspaper people called me and asked me what the 417 million pounds of fuel was in human terms. So I did the math and I came up with the Moon and the Sun trips. So it would be 2-1/2 trips to the Sun on 417 million pounds of fuel, in a pickup truck. We went over one billion pounds off-loaded out of United States Air Force jets over Afghanistan in October of 2002. That would allow every man, woman, and child living at that time in El Paso, Texas (533,000 is the population of the whole area there) to drive cars for over six months on the Air Force tanker fleet. I thought you’d want to know how much it takes to run an air campaign like Enduring Iraqi Freedom. All the best, Mark.’ Now, you look at this one of two ways. You can look at it as some people no doubt are, ‘Well, that’s why we need to reduce the size of the military, Mr. Limbaugh, because, see how much fuel we could be saving for ourselves and our children? Look how much they’re wasting and they’re killing people!’ You can have that reaction, or you could say, ‘My gosh, this is so massive. I can’t get my arms around this. I can’t comprehend this.’ But one thing I do know is there cannot possibly be a shortage of any fuel from which Jet A and gasoline are derived, i.e., oil. That’s just one day, two days essentially, folks.
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RUSH: Four hundred seventeen million pounds of tanker fuel in two Iraq operations, 417 million pounds of gas will keep a 737 jetliner airborne for 11.9 years.
There’s a little fact here that I am in possession of that if I shared it with you, we could probably cause a firestorm out there in many progressive liberal locales.
Now, we’ve talked about the amount of fuel in pounds — 417 million pounds of tanker fuel — for two operations in Iraq. That’s 417 million pounds. A pound of jet gas is six and a half gallons. Four hundred seventeen million pounds is enough fuel for you to drive 2-1/2 times to the sun without a refill, or fuel-up. So that’s a lot of fuel. That’s a huge carbon footprint out there. But, you know, some people don’t think about this. We have aircraft carriers. A lot of nations have aircraft carriers, and we have the best. We have big ones. Those airplanes have to land on those aircraft carriers, and they don’t have much room. That’s why there are tailhooks. These guys come in full power. It’s called power-on the landing, something like that. In case they miss the hook or something else goes wrong, they gotta be able to have the thrust and come back up and come around.
It’s something that simply must be done. Now, let’s think about the reaction to this fact, this little news in the deep, dark, sinister corners of left-wing blogville, which not just war is hell, think of the environmentalist wackos on learning this.
I mean, the carbon footprint’s giving them a heartache and a headache and a stroke, but now unused fuel sometimes is dumped into our pristine and very brave oceans. Meanwhile, Ted Danson’s been telling us since 1988 that the oceans had ten years to live, and we were dead if we didn’t do anything about them. Now they’ve added another ten years to this. I saw a story on CNN today. Well, it might have been Fox. Apparently, a little oil washed up on shore somewhere, and so some people, you know, went out there, do their good civic duty as human beings. They took some Dawn dishwashing detergent and some paper towels, and they’re trying to clean the oil off of the rocks and so forth, and out of the sand. I’m laughing at this. And they ran a little crawl that said, ‘63% of all oil in the ocean is due to natural seepage,’ which is also true. It comes from the ocean floor, seeps up there, and the ocean’s vicious stuff eats it up. It eats it up, spits it out or whatever. It’s far more powerful than we are. I think it’s probably more than 63%, because there aren’t that many oil spills, other than of course these fighter pilots dumping their jet fuel. (laughing) I love pressing this. I just love tweaking the New Castrati. Oh, yeah, poor Flipper! Poor Willy the Whale, whatever. What was the whale’s name? Willy? Free Willy. And who knows whatever else is out there, probably some octopus has been hit. You never know what’s out there.
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RUSH: Jim in Pascagoula, Mississippi, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, sergeant dittos from the Mississippi Gulf of Mexico.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, instead of those pilots dumping their fuel on Flipper, why don’t they fly around and fine something else to strafer bomb.
RUSH: Well, because a lot of times they’re out over the ocean.
CALLER: I got you. Like in World War II, those guys coming back from Germany went down low on the deck and found trains and trucks and things.
RUSH: You mean like to put an exclamation point on the — we didn’t fight wars under the rules of political correctness then. We fight wars under the terms of political correctness now. In fact, it’s gotten so bad if our bombs get too close to the target, it’s a demerit, too close to the target it might kill innocent civilians and women and children and minorities, so the farther miss the target, the less likely that is the case. I’m making obviously an exaggeration. But there weren’t any politically correct rules. I think also that there is the notion of conserving the ordnance, conserving the bomb supply. Be glad to dump the gas on Flipper, but we’re not going to waste those bombs. We’re going to save those bombs for rockets, for whenever they’re worth. Hm-hm. Hm-hm. Well, it’s possible. I’ve just been asked if any sea turtles may have been damaged by gas dumped in the oceans by jet fighters landing on carriers. You know, it would depend on the migration route of the sea turtle. We’ll look into that. This could explain why the sea turtle has — and this hasn’t even been proven — but it could explain why the sea turtle has now evolved to the point of stupidity. Rather than the little baby hatchlings going to the ocean, which is right there in front of them, they go to lights, that might be because of jet fuel being dumped in their environment. I’ll have to check that out.