GLENN BECK PROGRAM
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
GLENN: Rudy Giuliani gets the label of liberal. And I just wanted to pass on something that we found in the Washington Post from David Greenburg a guy who is not he's a liberal. And he's very upset that Rudy Giuliani keeps being painted a liberal. And he's like no he's not.
I mean this should be a campaign commercial. Is Giuliani on yet? Is he on? Bring him up if we have him. Rudy.
GIULIANI: How are you Glenn?
GLENN: Good how are you.
"When you look at Hillary and Edwards and Obama and Charlie Rangle's program, you look at things like that, you have to say, well there's a fifty/fifty chance that three years from now taxes will be 30% higher." GOP Candidate Rudy Giuliani |
GIULIANI: I heard what you said.
GLENN: Have you read this?
GIULIANI: I'd like to take him around the country with me. People in South Carolina and Iowa that I'm not a liberal. Everybody in New York knows that.
GLENN: Have you read this from
GIULIANI: I did. I did read it. I saw your show the other night with the fellow who did the survey in London that said I was the number one conservative. But I think there are a couple of people that should be ahead of me. But I was glad they noticed the fact that I was conservative in a place where it was hard to be conservative, which means the ideas that you do have that are, you must really believe in very, very strongly.
GLENN: I remember that you were the guy who did take the elephant dung, Virgin Mary and you kind of took that on.
GIULIANI: And the pornography effort. We rezoned the city and removed pornography, specifically from Times Square but to reduce it from the city. We won that battle. We had that battle with the ACLU and others. And we won that battle in court.
GLENN: Tell me, sir, how did it come about with Pat Robertson?
GIULIANI: It came about just by getting to know each other. There's no some people they attack all these things. There's no deal or anything. We just know each other. We got to know each other. We knew each other before that. But we got to know each other really well when we were coming back from Israel together in 2003. And we had a long time on the airplane to just talk to each other.
GLENN: Did you talk at all, because you are Mr. 9/11. And for the record you didn't bring that up, I just did. But you're Mr. 9/11. If you remember right Jerry Falwell said this was punishment for gays and everything else.
And Pat Robertson at the same time came out and said, "I concur. I agree." Did you have that conversation?
GIULIANI: By that time he had already explained that was a mistake. And I think both of them did a couple of days later and said that that was not what they intended and in all of our public careers, including mine, you can find some statements that I made which, afterwards, I'd like to say that isn't really what I intended to say and I didn't mean it. And I always give the people the benefit of that.
Whether they're my friends or not I always think you get a chance to explain it. If you don't explain it, then you're in trouble.
GLENN: I was talking last night, we had some poll expert on and I said, "I think" and nobody agreed with me "I think this speaks volumes of the Pat Robertson and really the feeling in America that you know what, you've got to prioritize what we're facing." You can say, hey, I want somebody who wants to ban abortions but you know what you better prioritize Jack because I can tell you abortion clinics will be shut down when we're a radical Muslim nation, because we've been overrun.
GIULIANI: This is exactly the point that Pat made. He gave a very good statement. And I think it is exactly his reasoning, which is Islamic terrorism and their war against us is going to be with us for some time and the most important thing is we have a president who understands it and is going to keep us on offense and understands the depth of it.
And he knows that I do from all the discussions that we've had. And second he said the number two priority is we gotta get control of government spending, that to a very large extent our party lost its control of Congress because we spent too much money.
And if we don't go back to fiscal discipline as a core of the Republican Party, we're just not going to be a majority party. And finally, he said, that on these issues, these social issues, the most important thing is who do you put on the bench, because that's where the decisions are going to get made.
And Ted Olson was with me. Ted's the head of my judicial advisory committee, and one of my closest friends. And he reiterated what I said, which is that I will appoint conservative judges. And ultimately I'll end up appointing a couple hundred of them. There's a big difference between me and Hillary on the judges we'd appoint. She would leave behind 200 very liberal activist judges I would leave behind as best you can make those decisions 200 conservative strict constructionist judges.
GLENN: I don't want a conservative judge. I want somebody who understands our founding fathers.
GIULIANI: That's what I mean by it. When I say conservative, I don't mean politically conservative, particularly. I mean someone that
GLENN: Reads the constitution.
GIULIANI: Sees the meaning of the constitution.
GLENN: Yes.
GIULIANI: In an intellectually honest way and seeks the meaning of the laws, not what you would like it to be. It may be if you are conservative, there may be some things you would like to see the law says. It doesn't, sorry. You can't create it that way. You've got to get a constitutional amendment then.
GLENN: Let me change gears to Bernake here. He just spoke in front of Congress and he said he's concerned that there's a slow down, a significant slow down in the economy. As I'm looking at this, I'm concerned with, there's just a billion things going on with the dollars and the banking and everything else. However, part of that is as a businessman I'm a small businessman and I was going to start another business line this next year. I'm not because I don't know what the policy of this country is going to be in 13 months from now, what is the policy of this country? Are we going to be are you going to, not you, but is the government going to take away all of my money in taxes.
GIULIANI: That's an excellent point I keep making and I believe many business people, investor, foreign and domestic, are trying to make that decision about what to do with their money.
GLENN: They are.
GIULIANI: When you look at Hillary and Edwards and Obama and Charlie Rangle's program, you look at things like that, you have to say, well there's a fifty/fifty chance that three years from now taxes will be 30% higher.
GLENN: Do you really believe that?
GIULIANI: Sarbanes Oxley will not be relieved at all and we'll have much larger central government. And I believe that the things that hurt the growth of an economy are pretty simply the following: Overspending by government, overtaxing, overregulating and oversuing.
On the other hand, I believe if you can get control of those four things, that's the best way to strengthen the dollar.
GLENN: How are you going to get control of spending when it's the Republicans doing it as well?
GIULIANI: You gotta do it from the top. I just had a press conference here in Iowa, and they were asking about the dollar. And I said the single most important thing the president can do to reestablish the strength of the dollar. President doesn't run the Fed. They should be independent. They're going to make their decisions. The president could do a peg program, a reduction in spending program for his agencies immediately. Impose five percent reductions on them or 10 percent, whatever he thinks is necessary, and have them go figure out how to save money.
It worked for me as mayor of New York City. I did it every year. It held down the growth of the government. It kept the growth of the government below the rate of inflation and the growth of population. I was about the only government in the country in the '80s to do this.
It's one of the reasons that as George Will said I ran the most conservative government in the country in the last 50 years. It was my fiscal conservativism. When you think about why the dollar is weakening, it's weakening because it's a statement of people's confidence of whether we're going to have economic growth or not. And our heavy spending is hurting that. And that would be one way in which we would make real progress, reducing spending but symbolically it would say we're getting our house in order. Then I think I would pick up on one of the things in Rangle's program he wants to reduce the corporate tax. I would say, Charlie, we agree on something. Not much but we agree on that one let's do that right away because it's the second highest corporate tax in the world.
And it will be increasingly, with all these other taxes that Democrats want to add to, a reason why people move money out of the country. And it's one of the reasons why I think the dollar is weakening. People the dollar is sort of a projection of where you think the American economy is going to go. Up or down.
GLENN: You not only have personal taxes you have corporate tax but NBC running green week, a parent company, G.E. for the love of Pete, you have no idea as a consumer or as a businessman what is our energy policy going to be like, what kind of entanglements are we going to get into on a Kyoto kind of way.
GIULIANI: What kind of tariffs will be imposed.
GLENN: Oh my gosh.
GIULIANI: They want to impose tariffs. I'm probably the best person to handle this, believe me, because of being mayor of New York City. I had to deal with all of this on a smaller scale in New York. New York had numerous high taxes, tremendous amount of regulation. Lots of protection just from local things.
I had to break through all that. And I had to try to present to businesses the picture that things are going to get better, the economy's going to get better. And we made a major turnaround. And we went from a city that had 10.5% unemployment to five. We brought new companies in. We got 450,000 more jobs. The president has to convince the world that America's going to be a sound fiscally conservative growth economy.
GLENN: Thank you very much Mayor Rudy Giuliani, as always a pleasure. We'll talk to you soon.
END TRANSCRIPT
