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GLENN BECK PROGRAM
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
GLENN: Senator
Rick Santorum is with us. Hello, Rick, how are you?
SENATOR SANTORUM: I'm doing great, Glenn. How are you today?
GLENN: I'm tired. Yesterday I went down to Washington, spent
an hour with the President in the Oval Office, which I know
you've done a hundred billion times.
SENATOR SANTORUM: Well, not quite that many.
GLENN: What an amazing experience that is for a guy whose
dad ran a bakery and -- you know.
SENATOR SANTORUM: It's really oval.
GLENN: It's amazing. It's amazing. The thing that I've been
trying to get across, because it was all off the record --
SENATOR SANTORUM: Yeah.
GLENN: The thing I've been trying to get across is when he
is off the record, he is not the same man.
SENATOR SANTORUM: You know, many times I've sat in the --
not in the Oval Office because I didn't have too many
meetings there, but we had a lot of meetings in the cabinet
room which is, you know, one office down from the Oval
Office and, you know, we'd sit there in these leadership
meetings and sometimes Republicans and Democrats combined,
mostly Republicans but, you know, we'd have Democrats there
on many occasions, too, and he -- when he sort of lays it
out and he's engaging and he's thoughtful and he's
persuasive and he's not afraid to use, you know, language
that is politically incorrect language, at least from the
state department's point of view, I mean, he's just, he
makes a very compelling case and he does a great job. And
then he gets in front of the camera and it just sort of
freezes up and doesn't happen.
GLENN: Yeah, he is the guy who was standing on the fire
truck with the bullhorn.
SENATOR SANTORUM: Yeah.
GLENN: It's too bad that we don't see it more often, but --
because he becomes -- this is who he is.
SENATOR SANTORUM: Yeah.
GLENN: And just full of confidence, and you walk away being
full of confidence. I want to talk to you a little bit about
this op-ed piece --
SENATOR SANTORUM: Yeah.
GLENN: That was in the New York Times a couple of days ago.
SENATOR SANTORUM: Yeah, great stuff.
GLENN: I think George Bush slept with that article. I think
he took that article to bed and said, I'm just going to hear
some good news from the New York Times op-ed page about the
war.
SENATOR SANTORUM: Yeah, Brookings. Two liberals from
Brookings, that's not bad. Well, look. I mean, I think
they're -- when they started out saying, listen, the war's
been mishandled on a tactical level in Iraq and as much of a
supporter as I am of fighting the fascists in Iraq, I can't
defend, nor have you defended on your show, you know, the
mishandling of a lot of situations there. But the bottom
line is that we're giving it -- we brought a new team in,
the President's brought a new team in, a new strategy,
someone who seems to know what they're doing, which is
General pet ray us, and they're trying this new approach and
it seems to be having some effect. And when you have folks
who have been critics of what hasn't worked, go there and
say, you know, well, looks like this is working to some
degree, it has put, I think, Harry Reid and a lot of other
folks who declared the even before it was really deployed;
that is, the surge, as lost and as ineffective, it puts them
in a difficult position of, you know, now arguing with
people that they used to agree with. And that's something
that is a very important potential turning point in allowing
this more time to work. That's really what we're talking
about here is giving the surge more time than next month,
which is when the congress wants to come back and shut it
down. September's going to be the report card and I'm
telling you, they're loaded for bear up on Capitol Hill to
shut this whole operation down starting in September. This
piece and probably others that will follow it, if we have
honest reporting out of that region, may give our troops a
little bit more time to get the job done.
GLENN: I don't believe we're going anywhere, Rick. I don't
believe -- you know, we talked about this on the TV show a
few weeks back that we have a $750 million embassy that's
the size of the national wall -- the national mall in
Washington. We have one of the largest Air Force bases in
the world in Iraq. This is Germany.
SENATOR SANTORUM: It's different in this respect. When you
say we're not going to go anywhere, I would agree with you
that our presence in the region will in all likelihood
remain. The question is what are we going to be doing there.
And my concern is -- and my concern from both Democrats and
Republicans, is that the -- I'll just talk from the
Republican side. Republicans going into the next election
are not going to want casualty reports like we've been
seeing over the past several months. They are not going to
want the level of activity where Americans are being killed
heading into an election. That's a reality. That's a
political reality that we're going to -- that the President
is dealing with and that our party is -- and the Republican
party is dealing with and so whether you're Republican or
Democrat, you've been seeing over the past several months
everybody saying it's time to get out.
When they say get out, I don't think Republicans mean
withdraw massive numbers of troops. What they're talking
about is stop fighting, getting back into base camps, not
being out there on those patrols, turning over that
obligation to the Iraqis and maintaining a presence there
but not putting us in a position where anybody gets killed
because it looks bad.
GLENN: Oh, wait a minute. Hang on a second. That's a great
strategy. That's what put us in Beirut with no bullets in
our guns back in the Eighties.
SENATOR SANTORUM: I am not for this strategy. Hopefully
you've caught on.
GLENN: I know that.
SENATOR SANTORUM: But I think that's what the Democrats want
is out. They want us to physically leave. Republicans want
us to stop -- want Americans to stop being killed. And so
way -- my concern is that the compromise is to just pull
everybody out of the fight, put them in a position where
they're not fighting anymore, where they are just sort of
protecting their own camps, they are doing force protection
at specific locations and hope that everything goes well and
things aren't, you know, incinerating around us which, of
course, I think is actually a high probability would happen
if we did that.
GLENN: Rick, have you spent much time talking about God with
George Bush?
SENATOR SANTORUM: I have a little, yeah. Probably more than
most, let's just put it that way.
GLENN: He spoke a little bit about the role of the creator
in this country with me yesterday, and it's like reading the
founding fathers' words. This guy truly, truly gets it, and
I think this is what -- I think this is what the liberal or
the progressive side of American politics doesn't
understand. They dismiss the creator. They dismiss the role
that God had in the development of this. Every founding
father said -- when I look back at it and I see all the
things that we went through and I see how things came
together, there's no way the hand of God wasn't involved in
this.
SENATOR SANTORUM: Yeah, I --
GLENN: And they dismiss it and so they don't connect with
our responsibility to free people.
SENATOR SANTORUM: Because -- I wrote a book a year and a
half ago called
"It takes a family" and in every chapter of
that book, I had a quote from the founders at the beginning
of the chapter and laying out the founders' visions, and it
is a vision based on the Judaeo -- look, this is a country
that was founded on a particular world view. It was a Judaeo-Christian
world view. The respect of human life, the liberty in
people's pursuit of what you call happiness, but happiness
wasn't self-gratification. What it was about was pursuing
your dreams, pursuing something bigger and greater than just
you. That is all throughout the creation of the American
identity, what made us a unique country and what -- the
President understands that. The left doesn't see anything
unique in that experience.
GLENN: No.
SENATOR SANTORUM: They see everything, every culture, every
opinion, everything is equally valid and there is no truth
and there is -- there's just whatever you want to do. And
that losing of an American identity is, I think, one of the
greatest threats that we face as a country and something the
President at his core understands is important for America
to survive as an entity.
GLENN: Yeah, I really, truly believe that if Americans would
reconnect with the faith of the founding fathers -- and I
don't mean that as Christianity. I mean the faith, the
Cicero faith, the faith of a creator that will hold you
responsible, that does exist, that demands that you serve
your fellow man to be able to serve him. If you just accept
he exists, he'll hold you responsible. To serve him, you
have to serve your fellow man. America would change
overnight and we would win this war.
SENATOR SANTORUM: Absolutely. And it is the reason. If you
want to look at the opposite side of that coin, you just
need to look at Europe where there is no faith, where there
is no -- I mean, it's rampantly secular and it is losing,
just objectively losing the fight against radical Islam in
their own neighborhoods and so if you want to see where
America goes, you know, 50 years from now if we continue to
head down where the left wants to take us, Europe is a very,
very good place to look. I don't think we're going to go
there because we are still a people that are a deeply
religious people. Over half the people in America go to
church on Sundays. Compare that to Europe which is 3%.
GLENN: But if you look at Europe, what happened to Europe is
the same thing that's happening over in the Middle East and
there is no separation of mosque and state in the Middle
East and there's no separation of church and state, and if
I'm having to pay my taxes to a church that has to, you
know, involve everyone and not offend anyone and it is the
mouthpiece for the government, I wouldn't go to church,
either. There is a revival in -- a small one, but there is a
revival of American style faith in Europe right now that is
heartening.
SENATOR SANTORUM: Well, the reason America has remained a
faithful country in my opinion is because we have a
marketplace of faith.
GLENN: Exactly right.
SENATOR SANTORUM: We don't have a state church.
GLENN: Yeah.
SENATOR SANTORUM: You are absolutely right. I mean, the
government co-ops the church and makes it, as you said,
meaningless. And so they've been doling out meaningless
faith in Europe for decades now and as a result nobody
believes it anymore. And that makes Islam, in my opinion, a
much greater threat to Europe than even to the United States
because they have nothing to fight back with.
One other point I want to make on the President.
GLENN: Real quick.
SENATOR SANTORUM: Because it's an interesting story. Shortly
into the President's term he was going through a tough time
and I went into the Oval Office and I said to him, I said,
you know, I'm amazed that you're handling all the pressure
and all this stuff with everybody coming at you. And he
looked at me, put his arm around me and he says, Ricky --
and he points up in the air. He said, that's because I put
my faith where it belongs, standing right in the middle of
the Oval Office. I mean, this is a guy who every day I can
tell you is directly connected to what that vision you
talked about.
GLENN: I cannot tell you how strongly I felt that from him
yesterday.
SENATOR SANTORUM: No question.
GLENN: God is his center. Rick Santorum, thank you very
much.
END TRANSCRIPT |
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