RUSH: Just as I predicted yesterday, the Drive-Bys and the Democrats are in an utter state of denial. This column that came out yesterday in the New York Times by former Kerry campaign advisor and a former member of the Clinton administration, both now at the Brookings Institution, just had the cable news Drive-Bys fit to be tied. The Democrats are in total denial. Not all of them, though. It’s interesting that James Clyburn, who is the House Democratic whip, he’s from South Carolina, in an interview with Dan Balz and Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post, said, ‘I think there would be enough support in that group to want to stay the course and if the Republicans were to stay united as they have been, then it would be a problem for us. We, by and large, would be wise to wait on the report.’ This is James Clyburn in the House. He’s talking about the September report from General Petraeus and he’s admitting that if the news continues to be good, it will be a problem for his party. We have audio from this, the web show, Washington Post talk with Cillizza and Dan Balz, they interviewed Clyburn and they had this exchange.
BALZ: What do Democrats do if General Petraeus comes in in September, and says, ‘This is working very, very well at this point. We would be foolish to back away from it’?
CLYBURN: Well, that would be a real big problem for us, no question about that.
RUSH: Great problem for us. They know, folks, they absolutely know. More on this in just a second. I want to go back to last Tuesday on this program, the 24th of July. I made a prediction about the surge.
RUSH ARCHIVE: It cannot be reported that the surge is succeeding, so what will be focused on instead, ladies and gentlemen, is how the political situation is falling apart, they’re not making progress and so forth. So wherever the good news is, it’s like the Drive-Bys and the Democrat Party find a way to avoid it. But their worst nightmare is for this news to start trickling out for the Democrat Party.
RUSH: I was on the cutting edge of this last week before any of the rumblings of this weekend occurred. Today on the Today show, Meredith Vieira talking to senator Chia Pet — that would be Senator Biden — ‘Recently two of the critics, members of the Brookings Institution, went over to Iraq, they witnessed it firsthand, talked to members of the military, came back, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times, among other things, it says, ‘We’re finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms.’ They recommend Congress to stay in the surge at least until 2008. In fact, things are getting better on the ground. Would you recommend that the surge be continued, Senator Biden?’
BIDEN: No, there’s military success, but there’s not any political success. If you can’t — all the military success does, you have enough forces there, we work hard enough, we can quell things in neighborhoods. But once we leave, unless there’s a political agreement among the parties, it explodes.
RUSH: Contrast this to what he said in the last Democrat YouTube debate where he was warning Democrats, (paraphrasing) ‘We can’t pull out of there overnight, all hell would break loose.’ Somebody got to him. Now he has to change his tune on this. But note my prediction about they will find a way to find the news is bad, they’ll focus on the political side, confronted with this New York Times op-ed. Biden says it doesn’t mean anything. The political side’s not working well. When the political side was working well, the military side wasn’t working well. Well, the political progress doesn’t matter, the fact they’ve got a constitution, we’re doing lousy on the ground with security and so forth. Yesterday on the Senate floor, Dingy Harry had this to say about the good news coming out of Iraq.
REID: The present nor the future seem particularly bright for the Iraqis and Iraq itself. Our brave troops are fighting in this intractable civil war.
RUSH: Utter denial and sticking to the talking points.
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RUSH: Let me ask you a question to ponder, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back, by the way. Special welcome to those of you watching on the Dittocam at RushLimbaugh.com today. What kind of politicians and Drive-By Media figures force their armies from the battlefield with an enemy that has killed 3,000 of its citizens and promises to kill more, especially when their armies are winning? What kind of politicians and media people do this? Force their armies from the battlefield into defeat against an enemy that’s killed 3,000 of its civilians, our civilians, our citizens, promises to kill many more, when their armies are winning? When our army is winning, force them off the battlefield, what kind of politician would do that?
You got James Clyburn of South Carolina say, yeah, this report could provide unity problem for our caucus in the House. It could be a problem. If a good report provides problems for the Democrat Party, what the hell would victory by the United States mean to the Democrats? What kind of problem would that cause? That’s unthinkable to them. What kind of politicians are these? Back to the audio sound bites. Ken Pollack, one of the coauthors of the New York Times piece yesterday, citing the success of the surge. He was on with Wolf Blitzer on CNN last night. Blitzer said, ‘Ken Pollack, your column does paint a pretty optimistic assessment of the US military strategy unfolding right now.’
POLLACK: The reason for the optimism was we did see greater progress with US military forces and Iraqi military forces in their effort to rescore security. I think we were all surprised by just how well things were going on that front.
RUSH: All right, but this guy, you can’t get away with that, this is CNN after all. He’s gotta get raked over the coals and his credibility has to be challenged, and Blitzer says, ‘Ken Pollack, was this part, though, of a US military tour, if you will, that they took you around, you were escorted from location to location to location and they were the ones that took you to specific places, or did you have the freedom to say, ‘I want to go here, I want to go there?’ Who organized, in other words, the stopovers, the visits that you were having?’
POLLACK: It was largely organized by the military. We felt that was important because right now the big story is the military story. We went specifically because we finally had a change in strategy. You’re aware of this Wolf. I’ve been on your show after all my previous trips to Iraq. Every one of those trips I came back more depressed and more frustrated than when I left. This was the first one that I came back actually somewhat more hopeful than when I left.
RUSH: So Blitzer then gave up. We move on to Hardball last night, the fill-in host Mike Barnicle interviewing Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution. Barnicle says, ‘You’re more optimistic than you were, say, six months ago. Is that a fair assessment?’
POLLACK: Yeah, that’s a fair assessment. This is honest assessment and reporting. It doesn’t mean we’re headed for victory in Iraq, but it’s a very clear sense that we had in Iraq last week that the military aspect of this is finally beginning to show some results.
RUSH: Barnicle then says, ‘Today again, as is every day, six killed, 30 wounded in a bus explosion in Baghdad. You just said that without Baghdad being cohesive politically, nothing will work in Iraq, and yet nothing seems to be working in Baghdad, so how can you be so optimistic?’
POLLACK: The military part of this strategy is working well enough to warrant a few more months of effort. We talk about a number of places where there are good things going on, but we also say the sectarian problem has not by any means being resolved. And what we’re talking about is a situation where there is some progress on the military front that I think permits us to try for a few more months to have some effort at political reconciliation. That’s an inconvenient fact for someone who’s already decided that the mission has failed, but it’s the reality on the ground.
RUSH: Ooh! O’Hanlon just nailed the Democrats there, folks, did you hear that? This is an inconvenient fact for someone who’s already decided the mission has failed, but it is the reality on the ground. Guys may end up persona non grata in their old haunts. There’s a mantra out there. In addition to the fact, well, we may be making some military progress, but the political situation is falling apart. Without political stability, all the success on the battlefield and the world won’t matter a hill of beans, blah, blah. There’s another mantra out there in addition to that one, which says that the Iraqis have to step up and defend themselves. That one doesn’t fly, either, because they are, exclamation point. They are joining the army, and they are joining police forces in record numbers. The tribal leaders, working with our forces as well, had the story last week, 25 different tribes of Sunni and Shi’a fed up with Al-Qaeda tactics, joining with our guys.
So the Democrats continue to use old talking points before the surge for all the reasons that I have been saying. They are invested in defeat. It’s crucial to remember, they are also trying to create public opinion that echoes their own. They don’t have that. They do not have a majority of the American people that want to lose. The Democrats, ‘Well, the American people wanted us out of Iraq, and that’s why we won the elections in November. The American people are fed up with this president.’ They’re not. They’re not fed up to the point that they want to lose. So, in addition to all these mantras, the Democrats are trying to create public opinion, being aided and abetted by their willing accomplices in the Drive-By Media. But as we see now, it’s beginning to turn against them. Even the first Muslim congressman from Minnesota, Keith Ellison just back from Iraq, and even he had to say, (paraphrasing) ‘I saw some progress over there. We gotta back off a little bit.’ Joe Lieberman unloads on the Democrat recently in the Senate for their amateurish attitude here.
I’m getting the feeling that the Democrats are beginning to see their strategy falling away. I think their strategy is falling apart. They have failed to convince the American people that this is a lost cause and should be abandoned because the American people don’t want defeat for their country. We are a nation of winners, and we do not want defeat for the US military, for whom most of us have an admiration and respect that we can’t express properly. The Democrats have failed, and you know when this stuff hit this weekend that they are having emergency meetings, and you see with the two sound bites we had with Harry Reid and Joe Biden they’re just going to keep on with their old talking points. They’re not going to abandon them. They are trying to create a false picture and scenario. They do it all the time. I’m not saying this is going to be easy, folks. It’s going to be difficult, and it’s going to be long term, but the situation there is not as they portray it to be. There’s almost a mathematical formula to this that I have detected. To the extent that we make progress, the Democrats’ political hopes are diminished.
Now, what kind of political leaders position themselves that way so that they only win when their country loses? What kind of brains do they have to position themselves in such a way so that when we make progress, their political aspirations are diminished? They’re the ones that created this situation. They’ve aligned themselves with the enemy. They continue to align themselves with the enemy. They won’t admit it, obviously. The enemy kills more soldiers, their spokesmen here in the US are the Democrats. When we kill more of the enemy, the Democrats are silent, and they say nothing. But when we have reports of another IED or pictures of a car on fire, then the Democrats assume the role of media PR spokespeople for Al-Qaeda. So the two-track Democrat strategy in play now: lose the war and cripple the presidency. Lose the war by undermining the armed forces, including their funding, cripple the presidency by unleashing all these investigations and prosecutions of the president’s closest aides. And note, none of this, folks, none of it, not one part of it is intended to help or strengthen the country. Just the opposite.
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RUSH: Folks, notice that in this entire strategery that the Democrat Party has laid out for the past four years since the invasion of Iraq, none of this is intended to help the country. None of it is intended to strengthen our homeland. None of it is intended to advance the well-being of the citizenry. None of it is. It is a two-pronged agenda driven for one reason and one reason only, and that’s to help a handful of extreme leftists who run the Democratic Party to expand their power. It’s the left-wing elites of the Democrats versus the rest of us, and that’s the best way to understand it. I gotta tell you, nothing that General Petraeus says in his September report will matter to Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid. They are dug in. They are entrenched. They can’t move off of this. They cannot give up their attempt to convince you it’s lost; it’s worthless. ‘We need to bring them home.’ They cannot come off of that. House Democrats, as evidenced by the statement made by James Clyburn, may have a little problem here. I think a lot of Democrats are going to have problems here. Lieberman is having problems. Time will tell. But Pelosi and Reid are dug in. You know something else? You know how odd the Democrat Party is getting?
The Democrat Leadership Council. Do you know what that is? The Democrat Leadership Council is an organization of supposedly ‘centrist’ Democrats. It used to be run by Bill Clinton. I think he’s one of the founders of the thing. IT was then run by a guy named Al From. The purpose of the Democrat Leadership Council was to act as a mask or a camouflage to hide the Democrat Party’s extreme liberalism, to show that they were ‘moderates’ and ‘centrists,’ and that that’s what Bill Clinton was, and that’s why it was created. It’s now run by Harold Ford who used to be a member of Congress from Tennessee. Guess what? There happens to be a convention of the Democrat Leadership Council (I think it’s this weekend or coming up soon) and it also happens to be coincidence with a convention of the kook fringe blogosphere. Guess what? None of the Democrat presidential candidates are going to the DLC convention. They are as afraid of the Democratic Leadership Council as they are afraid of going on Fox News. They are not going to go to the convention that tries to establish Democrats as moderate centrists because that would anger the kook fringe and that’s who these Democrats are playing to at this point in time for who knows what reasons. But this is not going to redound to their benefit. They are looking more and more like the people they are. Their agenda, Pelosi and Reid, simply does not permit new talking points. They’ve gone over the cliff. Defeat, or the perception of it, must happen, as far as they are concerned.
In fact, the Democrats’ chances, their entire existence, now depends on defeat. I mean that as seriously as I’ve ever meant anything I’ve said here. Their entire existence now depends on our troops losing in Iraq. They’re going to be in full attack mode. Let me say this. Their poll numbers in Congress are somewhere around Osama bin Laden’s. They’re lower than President Bush’s, and they may well be undermining themselves with this full-throated assault. But there’s also no denying that in the process of doing this, they’re not operating in a vacuum. They are making victory more difficult. We’re making outstanding progress after a long time of fiddling around. But it’s much harder because of their behavior, no doubt about it, and it’s harder to get the news out because of their behavior — because they can’t tolerate it, folks. What kind of politicians are these? What kind of politicians are these that would pull troops off the battlefield in the midst of success, ensuring defeat? What kind of politicians and media supporters that they have, are these people? It’s time that they be held accountable. They have to bear some responsibility for their behavior here. They are making this difficult for their own selfish and extreme partisan liberal reasons and desires.
It is they, the Democrats, who are prolonging these battles, not the president or the military, and it’s happening by virtue of their rhetoric. Their rhetoric emboldens and advantages the enemy. It encourages the enemy. If it hadn’t been for the Democrats’ rhetoric specifically the past three years, who knows what tatters this enemy might actually be in, but they have allies in this country, public relations allies. It is they who withhold needed resources to slow the march of our forces. It is they who do it. It is they, the Democrats, who are in essence spitting on our soldiers and calling them baby killers by their official actions and statements. By the way, the public may well be war-weary, but it’s always amazed me because most of the public has no role in this war. What is there to be war-weary about? What there is to be war-weary about is that we are losing — at least the perception is put out by the media that we are losing, and we are a nation of winners. The United States of America doesn’t lose, especially to a ragtag bunch of Seventh Century bombers! Yet the Democrat Party wants us to lose, has proclaimed defeat. The Drive-By Media echoes this.
The war-weariness has nothing to do with the fact that we are at war; it’s that we’re not winning it and that we’re roiled over it. I blame the Democrats for that. I blame the Democrats for the so-called war-weariness, because most of the public has no personal stake in this. I know the public is no doubt becoming fed up with the constant message of defeatism and surrender coming from the Democrat leadership. The American people don’t like defeat. George Patton said it: We are a nation of winners. We hate losers. No American… Well, no. I take that back. There are some Americans who do want to surrender. The far left-wing fringe of the Democrat Party, eager to surrender, want their country to lose. That’s who the Democrat Party is listening to today. That’s who the leaders of the Democrat Party are trying to appease and make sure that they keep on board, and it is sickening and disgusting because it is a sickening, small, deranged little minority of people. But you have a major American political party pandering to them for all the obvious reasons. Let’s go the phones. Bruce in Blairsville, Pennsylvania, I’m glad to have you with us, sir. You’re up first today.
CALLER: Okay. Hi, Rush. I’m calling about two things about these recent reports. One is the timing of the people reporting in the paper, make me suspect that it may be a design to raise expectations of success so high that anything less could be framed by the Democratic politicians as being a failure. Secondly, be wary of a Tet-like offensive by the terrorists right before the general’s report.
RUSH: Yeah. Yeah. Well, let me comment on both of those things, and in order. Note that most people will respond to the second question posed by an interrogator because they forgot the first one. I’m going to speak to yours in order. In the first place, it is entirely possible that there is a reduce going on. After all we’re dealing with the New York Times. It’s entirely possible that people are trying to raise expectations so high in people’s minds that nothing short of full-fledged victory and surrender, waving the white flag by Al-Qaeda, can been seen to make that happen. But I don’t think that this column has caught a bunch of Democrats off guard. I think it’s caught a of the Drive-By Media off guard, and they’re now trying to come up with new spin strategies to explain it, and that’s going to be one of them. ‘Well, they’re raising expectations too high.’ Remember, folks, you have to look at this through the lens they’re looking at it through, and that’s that the ’08 presidential election. That’s it for them. Everything they’re doing is oriented toward that. So they’re going to stick to their talking points, and they’ll find a way to massage these; they’ll have enough willing accomplices in the Drive-By Media to put out what they want.
But I don’t think that the Times ran this and I don’t think these two scholars wrote this piece as a means of building up phony expectations. It would be much easier to come back and say, ‘It isn’t working. This surge, whatever you’ve heard about it, it isn’t working. The military took us around, they tried to make it look the best, but we are scholars, and we’ve been there numerous times.’ They could accomplish much more for the Democrats by simply coming out and saying, ‘Whatever you’re hearing about the surge being successful, we didn’t see,’ and that would have caused a tsunami of Democrats running to the cameras and microphones. So I don’t think anything is conspiratorial about this. As to the Iraqi version of the Tet offensive, that’s just a theory based on intelligence guided by experience. When the side losing knows that a crucial point is coming up either on the political frame of its enemy — which we have the September report coming up, so that would be the thing that the so-called Tet offensive in Iraq would be geared to — they will launch everything they’ve got.
They will kill as many innocent people and they will do it as visually as they can. They’ll set as many explosions off, as many cars. They’ll have burning bodies. That’s the theory. It is designed to weaken the resolve — the will, if you will — of the enemy. Not our troops, but of you, the American people. That offensive, if it happens, will be aimed right at the US media to broadcast and amplify all over this country and around the world, to try to get people to say, ‘Oh, right. I’m so weary of this war. That’s it. Screw it. I’ve heard all of this wonderful news about the surge, and we can’t even stop something like this when we knew it was coming.’ Whether it happens or not is a guess, but it did happen in Vietnam. Al-Qaeda’s done this in a number of cases when there have been benchmark days coming up. They tried to stop the elections of Iraqi parliamentarians. They tried to stop the vote on the ratification of the constitution. They’ve done it, and they’ll probably do something like it again. The key here for me is: how successful will they be? That will be a measure of how successful the surge has been as well.
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RUSH: Headline to an AP story: ‘US Toll in Iraq Lowest in Eight Months.’ My initial reaction to that is: Well there’s more bad news for the left. There’s more bad news for Dingy Harry and Nancy Pelosi. When you stop and think of that, what is it that I’m saying? Fewer American deaths and casualties are bad news for the Democrats. This is not good. They cannot advance this is a talking point. They can’t say, ‘The surge isn’t working. We’re losing more troops,’ because their whole theory of getting out is that troops are not safe. It’s a civil war. There’s no use them dying, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Troop death counts have been the point of the realm for the Drive-By Media and the Democrats. So stop to think about this. ‘US Toll in Iraq Lowest in Eight Months,’ more bad news for Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Now, you might think this is a good story, but you would be wrong, because you are talking about the Associated Press. Let me give you some selected excerpts. ‘The US military said Tuesday that a Marine was killed in fighting west of the capitol, pushing the American death toll for July to at least 75, the lowest in eight months. An Apache helicopter also went down on Tuesday after coming under fire in a predominantly Shi’ite area in eastern Baghdad, but both crew members were safely evacuated. President Bush’s nominee to head the joint chiefs of staff, meanwhile, acknowledged that slow progress in Iraq is hurting America’s credibility and emboldening Iran’s regional ambitions.’ Uh…slow progress? In a story about the death toll being the lowest in eight months, during a period of time where anybody who’s noticing and paying attention knows that the surge is working. (tearing paper) This is about what the Associated Press is worth these days, folks. (tearing) I just threw it in my cardboard box trash container. Alex in Marshall, Michigan. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hey. Good afternoon, mega aficionado dittos, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you, sir. Great to have you with us.
CALLER: Right. Hey, Rush, I’m giving you a call this afternoon simply to give you your opinion on something I thought I saw and that is, did I see the possibilities of liberals abandoning or deserting the losing position? You know, we can’t help it. The stories go out, the unfortunate good news stories that things are working in Iraq. Things are moving along. How long can they all hang on?
RUSH: No. Where did you see that makes you think they might be abandoning their we-must-lose idea?
CALLER: Well, what I saw was really a report of some of the liberal think tank experts from Brookings and other places played on Nightly News how there’s success, yes. They can’t help but say some things are starting to work, and yet then they’ll go on to brush it aside. The mainstream will brush that aside and say, ‘Well, okay, but the truth is…’
RUSH: Well, let me review what I said about this yesterday. We had three days of news. We had a Saturday story in the Washington Post: Petraeus saying that the integration of Iraqis and security forces going great guns, bottom up. On Sunday, we had five journalists on a Chris Matthews Sunday show say commonsensical things about we can’t pull out now; it would cause a bloodbath; Iraq is not different than the war on terror, just a different front. It was mind-blowing stuff. Then on Monday we had the New York Times op-ed that you’re talking about. I’ll repeat what I just said: ‘Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are not going to change their song or their talking points.’ Nothing that Petraeus says will cause Pelosi and Reid to change their minds. They can’t. They must continue to counter the good news with whatever traffic they can create and convince as many Americans as possible that it isn’t true, that it’s already lost, that we need to get out. They will not, Pelosi and Reid will not change their minds. They can’t. They are dug in. They’ve gone over the cliff on defeat.
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RUSH: What kind of politicians are these that consider it unfavorable or unhelpful news that American troop deaths in Iraq are at an eight-month low? What kind of politicians are these that would, in the midst of success, try to remove our troops from the battlefield and secure defeat? What kind of politicians force their armies into these situations? What kind of politicians regard it as personally upsetting and a problem that battlefield deaths are at an eight month low in Iraq? What kind of politicians are these? By the way, for those of you new to the program — and I know that we have a tune-in factor here going through the roof; we’ve got people tuning in that are risk for the first time. Some of you may think, ‘Rush, do you really believe the Democrats are this bad?’ Folks, yes. I’m beating the drum here to try to convince as many of you as possible, this is exactly what’s at stake. There’s precedent for this. Back in the early days of the nineties, when we had the stock market bubble and it was plummeting, Dick Gephardt, who was then the leader of the Democrats in the House, was giddy. He was excited. ‘Every hundred points the Dow plummets, we pick up a House seat!’ They love misery. They love chaos. They love things not going well. That’s how they’ve set themselves up to win. They’re not the Party of Progress. They are the party of misery and chaos.