RUSH: I’ve read some of your e-mails out there, and there are two schools of thought being expressed on the whole situation with me, a private citizen being castigated and denounced on the floor of the US Senate by the Senate majority leader. Also the subject of a House resolution, a private citizen, me, denounced by Democrats on the floor of the House, and these resolutions are demanding that others condemn me and that I apologize for something that never happened and I didn’t say. The two schools of thought are: ignore it, Rush, don’t let ’em distract you; don’t let them divert you. Folks, they cannot distract me and they cannot divert me, and I’m not going to let this slide. Tom Harkin was pathetic — I feel like apologizing to his family for what he said yesterday on the floor of the Senate. It’s such a demeaning thing that he did and so below the decorum and the stature one would associate with the United States Senate. But that’s who these people have become.
What Harry Reid and Tom Harkin are doing is predictable. It’s what all leaders of all top-down, repressive movements do. They find ways to rile up and distract their dissatisfied, disaffected, and disappointed followers. It’s a convenient and non-substantive way to stay in power. After all, Harry Reid and Tom Harkin and all the other Democrats have failed miserably to come through on what their supporters have demanded of them, and that is to end the Iraq war and bring the troops home. So they have to distract from their own failures. Their General Petraeus ad was an absolute disaster. They need to change the subject. They need to try to redeem themselves after that disaster, and they do so by focusing on me because they know that their lunatic fringe base hates me, and if anybody is being distracted, ladies and gentlemen, it’s the Democrat base. The Democrat base is being distracted from noticing the abject failure of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to deliver on what their supporters consider their mandate to be following the November ’06 elections.
Congress’s approval rating under Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi is at an historic low. It’s about 11%. They have not secured America’s defeat, as was the implied bargain with their hard-left fanatics. Now, these grassroots kooks on the left got so mad about that very thing, they took out an ad in the New York Times smearing General Petraeus. They took matters into their own hands. So what now does Harry Reid do? What does Tom-Phony-War-Hero Harkin do? What do I mean by that? He lied about being in Vietnam in combat. What do they do? They smear me in hope of distracting their base, their angry, jilted, destructive base. Which is cynical, my friends. The assumption is that there will be people out there who will take the bait. Now, this goes on in the Middle East all the time. What do you think ‘death to America, death to America, death to Satan,’ is all about? It’s all about distracting the miserable people in the Middle East from the horrible, squalid economic circumstances in which they live in order to get hatred ginned up against the supposed reason for their squalor and hatred: the United States of America.
So the mullahs in Iran and the al-Zawahiris and so forth organize marches, the president of the United States is burned in effigy, and, for a while, the masses are distracted. This is what I call repressive governing 101. It’s exactly what Harry Reid and Tom Harkin have engaged in. They are not seeking the truth. They are buying time for themselves. They are making me a distraction from their horrendous approval ratings and their failures to do anything as far as legislation beyond naming some buildings. Oh, and the minimum wage. Repressive regimes never succeed in the long term, not without lies, propaganda, and an angry following. And when things go south on them, the propaganda arm of the ‘thugocracy’ moves into high gear, which is what’s happened now. The left, ladies and gentlemen, is imploding. They are fixated on taking down anyone and anything in the process: me, General Petraeus, anybody they think stands in the way of their ascension to the White House and their further consolidation of power. They are Stalinist-like. Anybody that says something that they don’t want to hear, that they don’t like, must be officially condemned by the state publicly. Even private citizens who get in their way, in the free market, must be condemned, must be smeared, must be lied about.
Ahmadinejad in Iran, no different. He needs the great Satan to hang onto control there. Harry Reid needs to do the same thing. Both men, Ahmadinejad and Harry Reid, have been disappointments, miserable failures to the people they claim to lead. Both of them are in trouble, and their publicity stunts prove it. Now, I think this Harry Reid move was boneheaded. It was not smart; it was unwise. The thing that we ought to demand here is that Harry Reid step down and resign as the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, for his constant, uncontrollable contempt of our armed forces, his repeated use of our troops for political purposes. Harry Reid has failed in his mission to lead the Democrats in the Senate to get what they want. He’s the one who should step down; he is the one who is dishonoring the troops; he is the one who is making a mockery of their service. We’ve got the sound bites coming up later in the program to document all of this.
I’d also like to point out that yesterday I issued an invitation to Senator Reid to come on the program and say what he said in that resolution or letter that he read on the floor of the Senate yesterday afternoon, come here and say those things to my face. You’re more than welcome. Democrats are constantly saying they don’t have a chance in conservative talk radio because consolidation has frozen them out and they need the Fairness Doctrine for equal time. Senator, I offered you equal time yesterday; I offer you equal time today. Come on the program, say those things to my face, and let’s discuss this. You are more than welcome to come to the EIB studios behind our Golden EIB microphone and tell me whatever you want to tell me about what you think I said. You’re more than welcome here. We do not freeze liberals out. We welcome them when they want to come on and discuss things openly and honestly.
I would like to point out Senator Reid and his long, sorry record of abandoning the troops on the battlefield. What do you think 55 resolutions to bring the troops home since they took office in January of this year is about? It’s about defeat; it was about destroying this presidency; it was about using the US military to advance his own party’s political fortunes. That’s why I say the military are political pawns. Our hero troops are mere pawns on the chessboard that they’re playing. Harry Reid challenged my patriotism yesterday. He did so openly and blatantly on the floor of the United States Senate. I don’t know who his sources — well, I do know, Media Matters for America. Now, it’s the Democrats who are constantly caterwauling, complaining and whining and moaning about their patriotism being challenged, and we’ve always said that when their patriotism is being challenged, it’s actually their judgment. But I have said in the recent past, ‘I don’t know sometimes how we cannot question their patriotism, given that they have sought the defeat of their own country in the war on terror and the war in Iraq.’
They themselves, folks, are undermining the troops on the battlefield with their words and their votes. Vote after vote demanding that we surrender, vote after vote condemning the mission, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Dick Durbin, Tom Harkin, Jack Murtha, others, smearing our troops in words and deeds. We should all be indignant about this. Every one of us who love this country should be outraged at the things these Democrats have said, the things that they have tried to do. And it is laughable to watch them now try to redeem themselves as supporters of the United States military, after months and months and months of proclaiming the surge a failure, after calling General Petraeus essentially a liar before he had said a word before them when he came to issue the report they required on the effects of the surge. The surge is working. Had we listened to Harry Reid, the number of deaths in Iraq, both American and Iraqi, would be sky-high today compared to the death toll that is plummeting compared to a year ago.
Look what they did to one of their own, Joe Lieberman. Look what they did to Joe, simply because he supports the United States in the war on terror and the war in Iraq. They destroyed him. They tried to destroy him; they tried to destroy his career simply because he supported the troops. Zell Miller parted with the Democrats over the war; first and foremost, they treated him like a pariah. Now, there’s a group out there called Vote Vets. I think it’s a subsidiary of MoveOn.org. They are running an ad starting today in selected places. I’ll tell you about it, and it’s a shame how they are using some valiant troops in their mission here to try to redeem themselves, the anti-war movement attempting now to come off as pro-military. It’s sad and laughable at the same time.
We know who they are. They are John Kerry, who was celebrated when he lied about our soldiers in Vietnam in testimony before a Senate committee, who met with the enemy while still in the military, and who has spent most of his career smearing the military and undermining them. It’s about Jack Murtha who is now the subject of a lawsuit for calling our brave Marines murderers of innocent civilians before any facts were known, and he did it at a press conference, not the floor of the House, just to make sure the entire world would hear it. It’s about Dick Durbin, the number two Democrat in the Senate, who actually compared our soldiers to Nazis, to Stalin’s assassins, and to Pol Pot’s killers. It’s about Ted Kennedy, who compared our military to Saddam Hussein’s henchmen. What he said was, during Abu Ghraib, ‘No difference, just under new management, the US military.’ It’s about Harry Reid, who declared the war lost, while brave men and women are on the battlefield winning the war against the terrorists. These are the leaders and the voices of the Democrat opposition.
Not a single resolution was offered by any Democrat or Republican repudiating these libels against our armed forces. Not a single vote was taken to condemn any of the things these Democrats have said and offered. Why would there be? These are the beliefs of the Democrat leadership, and the Republicans are too scared and weak to confront them. So I confront them, with you, my audience, giving me the strength to do so, because I know that you are always going to be there. I denounce them, I expose them, again with you, my audience. We are disgusted with the abuse of our soldiers — hell, our entire country. We are fed up with the abuse our entire country has taken at the hands of Reid and Pelosi and the rest of them. We are sick and tired, getting up every day and looking at the news and listening to Democrats about how this is wrong and that’s bad, everything is going to hell in a hand basket. Every day is a crisis. We’re going to die of global warming. We’re going to die of too much coffee. They scare us, they are doom-and-gloom apocalyptic pessimists, and we are sick and tired of this abuse of our military and our country.
We don’t want to sit quietly while they try to lose this war, while they stab the troops in the back, lying to them, misleading them, while they run roughshod over anyone and anything they perceive as standing in their way. They wage war on me with greater energy and more sense of purpose than they wage war on the enemies of the United States of America. They wage war on President Bush with more fervor and more energy, more passion, more desire, than they join the war on genuine enemies of this country. We are not going to sit quietly while their hit operation, MoveOn.org, trashes the very general who is leading our troops in this current victory and who cannot defend himself against these vile attacks and attackers. We’re not going to be silenced; we’re not going to be intimidated by these same political hacks who have lied repeatedly about what I said, and — more importantly — didn’t say. They can try to use Hillary’s group, which she admits to helping found and form, Media Matters. They can try to use their favorite anti-war organization. They can write all the letters they want. They can introduce resolutions; they mean nothing to me. They can’t do a thing to me.
There are tens of millions of us, both in this audience and outside this audience, who have had enough of what these people are doing, and that is why Congress rates at 11% approval, an all-time low. We despise, do we not, what these people are doing to our country? But we can remove them — that’s what elections are about — one by one if necessary. For example, I don’t believe the people of Nevada thought they were voting for an anti-war, big government, big taxing character assassin when they voted for Harry Reid. Reid tells his constituents he supports the troops. Somebody tell me how? I guess you support the troops by attacking me. He’s proclaimed defeat, waved the white flag of surrender, said the surge wouldn’t work, offered numerous resolutions to bring the troops home in defeat. Somebody name a single way in which Senator Reid’s helped fight the war in Iraq and the war against the terrorists genuinely?
He tells his constituents he is a frugal steward of their tax dollars, yet in Washington he demands massive new spending and tax increases. He better represents the views of the people of Massachusetts than the people of Nevada. He tells the people in Nevada that he supports good people being named to the federal bench, but back in Washington he leads filibusters to block some of the greatest legal minds from becoming judges because he, in truth, supports activist judges who undermine the Constitution. One day he’s going to have to answer to the people, Harry Reid will, as do all of these politicians. They’re just temporary inhabitants of these public offices, and when they abuse their offices, as Reid does every day, it eventually catches up with them. Ask Tom Foley. Ask Tom Daschle.