RUSH: This is Howard in Brandon, Florida.  Great to have you on the EIB Network.

CALLER:  Hi, Rush.  How are you doing? 

RUSH:  Very well, sir. Thank you.

CALLER:  It’s an honor to talk to you.

RUSH:  Thank you again.

CALLER:  I would just like to real quick say hello to my two sons.  One is a uniformed police officer in Cobb County, Georgia.  The other one is a detective in Hillsboro County, Georgia.  Boys, proud of you.  Rush, first off, I’ve got a bumper sticker for you: “Liar, liar, pantsuit on fire! Never Hillary.”

RUSH: (laughing) “Pantsuit on fire.” (laughing) I like, “She puts her pantsuit on one leg at a time like all the other guys.”

CALLER: That’s right. That’s right. Pants on fire, Rush.  Pants on fire.  In this case, it’s a pantsuit on fire. 

RUSH: Right. Right.

CALLER: As a Vietnam veteran, Navy veteran, I wanted to relate to you what my thoughts are on this $400 million.

RUSH:  Hang on, because I’ve got to break here in five seconds, and I don’t want to try to have you say it in that limited amount of time.  

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is Howard in Braden, Florida.  You’ve got — is it Braden or Bradenton? 

CALLER:  Brandon, Rush, just outside of Tampa.

RUSH:  Oh, Brandon.

CALLER: Yes, sir.

RUSH: Just outside of what? 

CALLER:  Just outside of Tampa.

RUSH: “Just outside of Tampa.” Okay. Cool.  So you have a theory about the $400 million ransom.

CALLER:  The point being that Iran really owes us millions of dollars for the damage they did by providing the engineering, design and materials of all the IEDs and shaped charges they provided to the bad guys in Iraq over the years.  Why did we not levy a claim against all this money, $400 million, and have that money set aside and put in an account for the Veterans Administration to pay for all the medical care that our veterans are going to need over the next 30 or 40 years, as a result of all these injuries that were caused by the material, design and information that Iran provided to the bad guys in Iraq?  It’s just amazing to me that you’ve got a government that is known as one of the worst terrorist providers in this world, that we would provide them $400 million instead of setting aside that $400 million for the Veterans Administration to provide for assistance to all the vets that either were wounded — or families of dependents — that will be out there for the next 30 or 40 years.

RUSH:  I don’t want to make you feel worse, but it’s not $400 million.  It’s $1.7 billion, and $400 million is just a part of it.  In addition to that, there’s $150 billion of Iranian assets that were frozen when we slapped sanctions on them for violating agreed-to terms in their nuclear plans, and that’s all been unfrozen.  So we have seen to it that one of the world’s largest state sponsors of terrorisms has been able to reacquire $150 billion, which they openly say that they would use some of it for terrorist activity.

And which John Kerry, our secretary of state (who served in Vietnam), has acknowledged that they will probably use some of it to modernize or equip or whatever they do to sponsor terrorism.  Now, the idea… You had a great idea here that we should be extracting payments for the damage they’ve done.  But we’re doing the exact opposite.  And a lot of people are asking, “What is it the Iranians have on Obama?”  It makes so little sense that that’s what people start asking.  “Why in the world…?

“Of all the nations in the world, why in the world would you help — in every way you can — this nation become a nuclear power in that part of the world, where we have one and really only one ally, which is Israel?  Why?”  And since there aren’t any commonsense answers that people can understand, they start trying to find other explanations.  This is not by any means the first example.  There are countless examples of the Obama administration being friendly with, making overtures to Iran.

And in the middle of it, the Iranians never moderate.  We’re told, “There are moderates that we’re dealing with, and that’s why we can do it! There are moderates springing up, not the mullahs and not the ayatollahs.”  But that isn’t true.  Rouhani isn’t a moderate.  He’s not really a leader.  The supreme leader is the grand ayatollah.  In this case, it’s the Ayatollah Khamenei.  Have you ever wondered why Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not there? 

It’s that for one reason or another the Ayatollah Khamenei wanted to send him back to painting graffiti on the walls.  They put Rouhani in there because he makes a better impression, less imposing, comes across as more moderate.  Ahmadinejad was out there promising everybody what he was going to do: Wipe us off the map and Israel off the map — and, by the way, while we’re at it we want to revive Germany!  The Holocaust never happened. 

So they had to get rid of him because he didn’t facilitate their desire to look less threatening.  So this relationship that our administration has with Iran — not just on the surface, but when you start drilling down deep — still doesn’t make any sense.  Now we pay this ransom and the regime goes out of its way to say, “No, no, no, no, no, it’s not a ransom!”  The Iranians have released video! They’re bragging about it.

They released video and a still shot of the pallet containing the $400 million.  Remember, though, the big story is none of that.  The big story today is how Donald Trump made a mistake.  “He said that he saw the video of the money arriving, and there is no video,” the Drive-Bys say.  That remains the big story.