Duncan Hunter on Glenn Beck Program (transcript)

GLENN: First we wanted to spend a couple of minutes with Duncan Hunter, presidential candidate for the Republican party. Hello, Duncan.

GLENN: Very good, sir. I got the lecture of my life from a friend of mine this weekend.

GLENN: He said to me, why are you not screaming Duncan Hunter’s name from the highest mountaintop every place you go?

GLENN: I know. And he said, I am the biggest fan of Duncan Hunter; he is the man for the moment.

HUNTER: Well, that’s kind of him. Well, hey, listen, I got a hot one for you this morning along with the fence.

HUNTER: I just met with the President a few minutes ago and I don’t know if you saw this, the headlines today, but the State Department is having trouble finding 45 State Department foreign officers out of 10,000 who will agree to go to Baghdad and they just had a town meeting with their leadership and said it’s dangerous; we don’t want to go even if it’s the green zone. And so I sent a letter to the President. I’ve sent a copy to you saying this, and I talked to the President about 30 minutes ago. I said, let’s go over to Bethesda and Walter Reed and as we get these new — these soldiers and Marines who are embarking on new careers, let’s recruit them for the State Department and let’s fire these guys that refuse to go and we’ll give the State Department careers to these military guys.

GLENN: That is fantastic. That is fan — these guys are some of the most remarkable humans I have ever met and none of them, as you know, none of them want to leave service.

HUNTER: Exactly. And this would be great service for them. In Baghdad, in the State Department, the embassy, they know the lay of the land, they know the people and they are professionals and they are patriotic.

HUNTER: Well, he said that may be a good idea. He was fairly noncommittal but I gave him a letter. I said I wanted to look at it and I’m going to be following up with Secretary Rice and I’ve got the letter. I think it’s been faxed to you. But it just finishes saying, I urge you to request that Secretary Rice immediately send a team of State Department recruiters to Walter Reed and Bethesda hospitals to our wounded warriors who will serve our country efficiently, effectively and with undying patriotism. And they won’t hold a town meeting to tell you that they don’t want to go.

GLENN: I mean, I think that’s tremendous. But you know what, Duncan? Here’s the real problem. There are so many things going on right now that just don’t make a lick of sense. None of this stuff makes sense. We’ve got the Law of the Sea Treaty that is passing in Senate committee. Tell me your view of the Law of the Sea Treaty. You can’t be for that.

HUNTER: No, I’ve opposed the Law of the Sea Treaty every time it’s come up during my career and I continue to oppose it. And you’ve got all these treaties which tend to hand judicial jurisdiction to third-party judges and courts in other parts of the world that will affect Americans, and that’s happened with the World Trade Organization, but we’ve seen the judgments and orders come down that affect American manufacturers that are made by very self-serving judges and panels in other parts of the world, and it’s a seeding of American sovereignty. So I believe in not blurring these lines of sovereignty. I believe in strong borders and I believe in the United States having everything that it needs to operate effectively and independently and that’s how we keep our freedom.

GLENN: I have to tell you, I just feel like we are being taken apart a piece at a time by so many different, so many different entities and enemies all around the world. I mean, nobody is paying attention to the border, and everybody wants to cry it’s racism. How about the 70 people, Americans, that have been kidnapped in Laredo alone, and two young girls that were taken and given as a gift to a drug lord and yet nobody in the media will cover that, nobody. I tell you, and you know this because you’re one of the few in congress that is actually fighting this battle with everything ya got. These congressmen will come down to the border and they will talk to the people, and I talked to one sheriff in Laredo and he said, I’m begging congress to do something and give me money and instead they’re giving $550 million to the Mexican government to fight crime there. How about helping me here on this side?

HUNTER: Listen. That makes sense, Glenn, but you know what else makes a lot of sense? When I wrote the Border Fence Act which is now the law of the United States and it passed over a year ago and the President signed it last October 26th, the first piece I put in that fence with a deadline for construction is 15 miles of border fence on each side of Laredo, Texas, because Nuevo Laredo is a city owned by the drug lords. They’ve had hundreds of unsolved murders, most of them executions by drug lords. If you are a law enforcement officer in the Nuevo Laredo side and you say you’re against drugs, you’ve got about a 25-hour life expectancy. This administration has not built a linear inch of fence and we have the — we have lots and lots of politicians, some of them from border areas, trying to stop that fence from going up. In fact, we’ve got a total of 400 miles of double-border fence that I put into the law scheduled for Texas. Not one inch has been constructed. And incidentally I’ve got a report for you. Out of the 845 miles of double fence that I put into the law that the President signed more than a year ago, the Department of Homeland Security has built precisely by their report this morning 20 miles and that includes the 9 miles of border fence that I had already built between Tijuana and San Diego back in the 1990s. So they built 11 miles of new fence and they built 75 miles of a single layer of fence, out of the 854 they were scheduled to build.

GLENN: See, here was my statement back to my friend, and I hope you know, Congressman, how much I respect you and how much I respect the service to the country that not only you have given in the past but also your son. He’s a Marine as well, right?

HUNTER: My dad and my son, Marines. It skipped a generation. But listen, he’s coming back and he’s on the ballot to run for California.

GLENN: Good for that guy. Here’s what my response was. I respect you. I think you were right on all of the issues. However, you’re the guy that got the fence built in California, for the love of Pete. You are the guy who got the fence bill into and passed through congress. You got the financing for it and yet nobody really knows that. And now it’s all bogged down. And my question to my friend who is a huge supporter of yours — and again no disrespect. If you don’t have the machinery to get that word out that you have done such an amazing job, how can you shape the news of the day as President of the United States?

HUNTER: Well, Glenn, here’s what I have done. You know, I’m only one out of 435 congressmen, but when I went into Texas last month, I won the straw poll. That’s at the Republican party state convention in Texas, among Republican delegates from Texas, guys who had been to the national convention or the state convention. I won that straw poll among a Republican presidential contenders by more than 2 to 1 over the closest follower and that was Fred Thompson. And I beat most of the other guys by 5 and 6 to 1 and that’s because folks in Texas understand that I built that border fence in San Diego.

HUNTER: Secondly, I won the straw poll in the State of Arizona among elected Republican leaders because they know that I built that border fence. So we are getting that word out. And I’ve been talking about it on the debates lately. As you may know, as you know last time I saw Wolf Blitzer as one of the moderators of the debate, that fence I built is not that scraggly little thing people are hurdling in your previews and on your television show. It’s a double fence and if you can climb over my fence, we sign you up for the Olympics immediately. Lots of people are now learning about that double border fence.

GLENN: So you sound like the guy that all conservatives want. Why are you — why are you not blazing the trail? What has happened — in your mind what is happening? Why have people not connected yet?

HUNTER: Well, listen. You’ve got a country with 300 million people and when you start out from a congressional seat, you’re 1/53rd of one state. I’ve got the 52nd congressional district in California and you have to get out on shows like yours and get the word out. So what I need is airtime, and we’ve been putting a lot of time in getting airtime, traveling. I was in three states last weekend. It’s a monumental job, Glenn, to run for the Presidency of the United States but, you know, we’re doing well. As I said, we won the straw poll in Texas by more than 2 to 1 We won Arizona. I tied McCain and Giuliani at the top in the first big straw poll that Fox News held in South Carolina, first one east of the Mississippi. Now, I don’t have huge national numbers right now but that’s because you’ve got a huge country and you’ve got hundreds of millions of people.

HUNTER: First I’ve got to get my name out. They have to know who Duncan Hunter is. I need your help, Glenn Beck.

GLENN: Here’s what I’m going to do. You tell me when you’re going to be in New York and we will schedule an hour and you and I will sit down on television for an hour.

GLENN: And I will give you that. I’ll give you that opportunity. As you know and I know, our country is in real, real trouble and we’ve got to have the right person at the helm.

GLENN: I have always believed that the only way that we’ll ever be dismantled is from within, that no foreign force could ever destroy us. We have to destroy ourself. And I have been looking at why are we embracing socialism so much? Why are we fighting against things that are so common sense? How could we possibly have homeland security when there’s no border security? You can have homeland security. Can you tell me if — do you believe that it’s paranoid thinking to believe that the barbarians are not at the gates; many of the barbarians are within the gates.

HUNTER: You know, Glenn, this will be the tragedy of the century. If having dissolved the Soviet empire with a policy of strength and strong principles and strong character, if having dissolved the socialist Soviet Republic, we ourselves slide into socialism. And what I want to see is an American people who, the day I walk out of the White House after eight years, are more independent of government than the day I walk in. That’s what we need for this country, independent Americans, rugged individualism, accountability. But you know something? That seed is within our people and if you go over to Iraq and Afghanistan, you will see these incredible people in the uniform of the United States who have a ton of spirit, they’ve got energy and they are coming back and they are going to rejuvenate this country and reenergize us with the spirit of freedom.

GLENN: I don’t think so, either, but I am fearful, sir, that – I mean, you spend time in Texas. My eyes were really opened when I went down to Texas and I saw that rancher spirit, that American spirit, that ruggedness. And Texans think differently than most people. I think they are a little farther ahead in the curve of disenfranchisement than the rest of the country. And I was concerned because I had a lot of people coming up and saying, when are we taking our country back. And they didn’t mean like, when are we going to the voting booth. They meant, when am I going to take my country back because a lot of people are beginning to believe that it’s lost. And I don’t believe it is. But do you feel that disenfranchisement? And how can you explain that to the nincompoops in Washington that I think are doing many things to create it?

HUNTER: Listen, Glenn. Every major political movement starts not in Washington but it starts with the grassroots. And, you know, that was that incredible charge against amnesty, that uprising in this country from the average guy literally blowing the double doors off the U.S. Senate with millions of telephone calls, e-mails, personal conversations that kept them from passing amnesty. After you had about the millionth person call each one of those senators, they suddenly found technical defects in that amnesty bill, and that’s where every political movement has to come from. It’s got to come from the grassroots and that’s the business you and I are in and that is inspiring folks at the grassroots. So we’ve got to keep inspiring. We’ve got to do a better job.

HUNTER: Glenn, I’m so proud of California and I’m so proud of San Diego. Let me tell you, you know, we weathered this huge fire and it knocked down about 400,000 acres in my district and it got about 2,000 houses. In fact, we evacuated our canyon. My wife called me up and we’re just rebuilding from the last fire. We haven’t lived a day in the house yet. It just got finished. And she said, the bad news is we got evacuated again. But let me tell you. We evacuated hundreds of thousands of people from San Diego County. We left entire communities open. We had almost no instances of looting. Neighbors were helping neighbors, helping them with their livestock and food and bedding. It was a great example of a community working together and doing a wonderful job. I was really proud of our community and our state.

GLENN: I don’t think there was anybody that saw the pictures coming from Qualcomm that didn’t, you know, internally applaud and just say, wow, look at the amazing people in California and how they are dealing with this.

GLENN: The nonsense of not burning or clearing brush and then just building the house again, when is that going to ever make common sense to, you know, the government of California?

HUNTER: Glenn, I’ve got a bill I’m introducing today which says no other law with standing, and that includes the Endangered Species Act which stops you from brushing your own property, any private person may brush back their property as far as they want for purposes of fire protection. And you may recall years ago in Riverside County, you had a landowner who was going to be criminally prosecuted because he disced a fire break around his house in an area which has the endangered rat species from California.

HUNTER: But anyway, I’ve got a — while people have good sense — and incidentally I was on — I did this ABC thing with Dianne Feinstein right after the fire and she agreed with this point. We’ve got to be able to secure a margin in brushback and have communities and private people have a margin of cleared land. Otherwise you’ve got a wall of flame that comes right up to the housing area. Then it starts catching the houses on fire.

GLENN: I mean, I know you understand the founding fathers but, you know, I mean, they changed life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Originally it was life, liberty and property but they took property out because they knew it would get into a slave issue. For the love of Pete, when did we lose the right to do what we want on our property?

HUNTER: Yeah, here’s what some communities and some states want to give you. They want to give you the right to pay taxes and nothing else and so you’ve got places in California now where you can’t clear your land, you can’t cut down a tree, you can’t go anywhere near a stream bed and you end up with a government agency. I talked to a guy who is a firefighter up in Santa Barbara. He was taking bulldozers across a creek to stop a forest fire and the fish and wildlife guys ran down and stopped him because they were endangering frogs in the creek and they told him if he crossed the creek, they would arrest him. He crossed it anyway. But that shows you the mindset of this bureaucracy that we’ve put in charge of basically taking property rights away from real people. So I’m going to offer this brushback bill. I’m going to see how many sponsors I can get, especially from the Democrat side, who will stand up to the endangered species act for a change.

GLENN: Duncan Hunter, I’m going to have my people be in touch with your people today and we will have you on for a full hour on television. It is a pleasure, sir, always to talk to you.

BIG HUGE BUMP!!!

Anyone know Beck’s numbers on CNN? He and Lou Dobbs are the only talking heads I can tolerate watching anymore (including Fox, feh..). Oh yeah, C-SPAN too.

In fact Beck is the only guy on TV I would trust to ask legitimate, relevant, issues-oriented questions of Hunter, and I’d like to hear more from him. (Notice how Beck goes right to the heart of the matter for conservatives, to wit asking Hunter twice why his accomplishments don’t translate into better name recognition.... which is exactly what I’ve been wondering about Hunter for months now).

LOST PING!

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“In fact Beck is the only guy on TV I would trust to ask legitimate, relevant, issues-oriented questions of Hunter”

Lou treats him well also.

Dobbs & Beck are the only reason I turn the TeeVee on.

I watch C-SPUN to try and keep up with things, but they irritate me as much as the drive-bys.

People see him and like him.

My wife saw him on one of the news channels and tells me she is going to vote for Hunter in the primary. I told her that I had already decided that I would vote for him unless a good reason not to come up.

So far nothing negative from him and none of the other candidates has really impressed me. I thought Fred might but he hasn't "not so much".

This was my favorite:

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