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I have a couple of audio sound bites I’d like you to listen to: Condoleezza Rice, addressing the staff of the state department today. You know, before we get to that, just a couple of observations here. Remember, Colin Powell was actually the secretary of state when he testified before Congress and the UN, and what did he say? He said emphatically the same things that Condoleezza Rice and the president and Prime Minister Blair and Bill Clinton said about weapons of mass destruction. Yet, Democrats in Washington would never call Colin Powell a liar, nor would they mount a fund-raising campaign based on his testimony or his words. They have praised Colin Powell up and down. So what’s the difference? Why is Condoleezza Rice blamed but Colin Powell escapes blame? I’ll tell you why. It is because Condoleezza Rice is rightly considered more loyal to President Bush than Colin Powell was. We know that Colin Powell spoke to the media behind the administration’s back to promote different viewpoints. He and Richard Armitage have admitted that they did so. As for the president, the libs say he shouldn’t have yes-men around him. It’s not good to have nothing but a bunch of yes-men around him.
All right, I wonder if the same holds true for senators? Does Ted Kennedy have any conservatives on his staff advising him? Any pro-lifers, any capitalists, any hawks? Of course not. What about Dusty Harry Reid? Does Dusty Harry Reid have any people that disagree with him on his staff? What did we learn yesterday about Dusty Harry? One of the protesters at the inaugural parade was a chief staff member of Dusty Harry Reid’s, and he was arrested. The man was arrested. “Well, I was out here on my own time. I was not out here as a member of the Senate staff.” What is this yes-men business? Bill Clinton didn’t have a bunch of people around him that disagreed with him. Bill Clinton had total yes-men and women who went to the bank lying for Bill Clinton, repeating whatever lies he told because there was such loyalty, and nobody in the press, nobody on the left ever cared diddly-squat about that. But now Condoleezza Rice is right in line with George W. Bush, and because of that, we can call her a liar, too, and we can raise funds based on her lying testimony. Things that she said were identical to Colin Powell, and not one liberal Democrat ever challenged Colin Powell.
Hell’s bells, folks. This is a party that won’t even tolerate a speech from a pro-life governor of one of the largest states, the late Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, and they’re out there worried that there are a bunch of yes-men around President Bush. The Democratic Party is a party that is so controlled from top to bottom by the far left that it is imploding. Their coalition is made up of the left, the far left, and the cook left, with the cook left slowly and surely becoming the majority left of the Democratic Party. And they’re out there making absolute jackasses of themselves, promising that go they are going to have open arms. They’re willing to work bipartisan-ly with the president. They’re willing to meet him halfway, and yet they obstruct the Rice nomination, the Gonzales nomination, both foregone conclusions, they say one thing, they do another. Here’s Condoleezza Rice, first of two sound bites addressing her staff at the state department today. She basically tells the bureaucrats over there, she’s going to listen to them but that they are going to support the president’s agenda.
RICE: I’m going to look and the president is going to look, to this department to lead that effort, and not just to implement policy, but we’re going to need ideas, intellectual capital. I need your ideas. My door will be open. Please, understand that this is a time when history is calling us, and I just look forward to working with each and every one of you toward that end. The president has laid out a bold agenda, and he expects a lot of us. I want you to know, too, that I’m going to be committed to you, the men and women of the Foreign Service, the civil service, and our Foreign Service nationals abroad, and you in turn will be committed, and we in turn will be committed to carrying out that bold agenda.
RUSH: Uh, folks, those are fighting words to the state department. Let me just tell you what she just did there. She took the gloves off and she said: For once you’re going to support the president. For once you’re going to support this president’s agenda. For once you’re going to get behind America as this president’s agenda is laid out. I’m going to listen to you. I’m going to listen to what you say. My door is always open. But make no mistake, you will be committed to carrying out the president’s bold agenda. You have to understand who many careerists in the state department are. They are there specifically to oppose any Republican or conservative agenda, regardless. Our own state department! We’ve had Bill Gertz on talking about this and there’s some of this in the CIA and Porter Goss is over there cleaning that out just as Condi has. She laid down the law, she’s going to clean it out at the state department as well. Now, I love this next bite, because, of course, this is something that we’ve talked about on this program, and we’ve put documentation at RushLimbaugh.com to illustrate this. Condi Rice speaking to her state department staff talking about her experience as the White House Soviet specialist at the end of the Cold War, and then she said this. You know, this is about Iraq, and she uses the example of Germany.


RICE: I got to participate in Germany unification and the liberation of eastern Europe and the peaceful talks with the Soviet Union, but you know, I realize that I was just harvesting good decisions that had been made in 1946 and 1947 and 1948. A lot of those decisions spurred by good work done by this building, the men and women of the state department. And those were days when it must have seemed that freedom’s march was not assured. You think about it, in 1947 civil wars in Greece and Turkey, and in 1948 the permanent division of Germany thanks to the Berlin crisis and in 1949 the Soviet Union explodes a nuclear weapon five years ahead of schedule and the Chinese communists win. It must not have looked like freedom’s march was assured. But they somehow pulled themselves together, people like Truman and Atchison and Marshall and, of course, on Capitol Hill, Senator Vandenberg, and they created a policy and a set of institutions that gave us a lasting peace. While no one might have been able at that time to imagine a Democratic Germany or a Democratic Japan, when President Bush now sits across from chancellor Schroeder or from Prime Minister Koizumi he sits across not just from a friend but a Democratic friend.
RUSH: The reference is clear, Germany and Japan both in the post-World War II days looked lost. There were stories all over the American media that we’re losing the peace in Germany; they hate us there; they hate our soldiers and our military, there’s no chance. The New York Times, LIFE magazine, all writing about this, and Condoleezza Rice is reminding people here. She didn’t say Iraq, but we all know that the implication was clear. We can’t be quick and hasty to judge the success and the rolling out of freedom in any other part of the world when look how long it took in Germany and Japan, and look at all the things that happened post-World War II that looked as though they would doom any march to freedom, basically the establishment of the Cold War. But visionaries stuck to their goals. Well, one did, Ronald Reagan. Before him it was a bunch of appeasers who simply accepted the notion that the Soviet Union was going to exist side by side for as long as the world lasted and that we were going to have to find a way to appease them and get along with them, because defeating? Well, we couldn’t do that. It would risk nuclear destruction — and yet we came along and did so without firing a shot.
It’s a great example of positive thinking, a great example of optimism in contrast to the doom-and-gloom pessimism and defeatism of the left. And it’s a good lesson to learn, too, that this doom-and-gloom pessimism and defeatism of the left is not new. It defines them. Doom-and-gloom pessimism, “Oh, woe is us. All is lost! Look for the worst; expect the worst, and be surprised when something else happens is their daily existence, be it internationally or in the arena of domestic possible.” You just never hear these people talking optimistically. You never hear them happy. You never hear them talking about great possibilities. They pooh-pooh great possibilities. They are the it-can’t-be-done crowd. They are the we-can’t-do-it crowd. They are the we-shouldn’t-even-try-it crowd. It’s too risky. It’s too dangerous. It’s none of our business. Of course when they get in power they change this a little bit and try to impose their will in various places, but they are so absorbed on themselves, that they have ceased to even be helpfully functional.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: One more Condi Rice sound bite. A fascinating piece by Deborah Orin today in the New York Post. Exactly what I said is going to happen is happening. There are several in the official and unofficial black community’s leadership and rank and file in this country unhappy with the Democrats over their treatment of Condoleezza Rice. I’ll get to that here in just a second. But here is Condi telling the state department staff, that is now hers, that democracy is entirely possible in the Middle East. And I’ll tell you there are a bunch of people in the state department who don’t think that’s possible, folks.
RICE: I know that there are those who wonder whether democracy can take hold in the rocky soil of the West Bank or in Iraq or in Afghanistan. I believe that we as Americans who know how hard the path to democracy is, have to believe that it can, and we have to make it so that we work with those who want to achieve those aspirations so that one day a future president is sitting across from the Democratic president or prime minister of many a Middle Eastern country, of many a country that has not yet known democracy. That’s our charge; that’s our calling.
RUSH: Do you understand the gravity of this? This has never been said to people at the state department. You couple this with the fact that you will implement the president’s agenda. You will help this agenda become reality. I mean, the gauntlet’s been thrown down. No wonder the left is all upset that a “Bush yes-man” is over at the state department. Look, I know this may come as a surprise to a lot of you, and I go back to when I was a kid. I thought every American was an American. No, no, no, seriously. I mean, I thought everybody was equally patriotic. I thought everybody loved their country, and as I grew older and I came of age in the Vietnam War and I found out it wasn’t true, you know, it was a shock, and I still haven’t come to grips with it. I still don’t understand it. I mean intellectually I don’t understand how people born in this country can so despise it. I have learned the psychology of these people, I understand who liberals are, and what they are, and it helps to explain it, but understanding it is another thing. How in the world you can have a negative view of this country and a negative view of our role in the world and the opportunity this country provides for people is something that is beyond me.


Now, the reality is that there are a lot of screwed up, confused people who do nevertheless dislike this country to one degree or another. Now, I always thought growing up, too, that the government was equally patriotic, that the government was the leader of patriotism, that the government was where all of this good work happened to fulfill the dream of greatness. And then as I grew older and learned things, I found out that there are several institutions of government populated by people who hate the country or who don’t like it or who don’t have faith in it or whatever, to whatever degree. The state department’s one of those places. It turns out the CIA is another, and the reality is real simple. Once you get past the childhood Utopian vision of your country you find out that liberals are everywhere, and a liberal is a liberal. A tiger is a tiger. And a liberal, while professing love for the country, you’d be hard-pressed to define it by listening to them speak. They’ve got big problems with the country. They’re unhappy with it a lot of times. Some of them actively do not like it. That’s why there is a blame-America-first crowd. They’re out there, and they never disappoint. Well, the bottom line here is that a lot of the career people at the state department are of this liberal persuasion, this negative “it can’t be done” America is too big for its britches mode of thinking.
So when Condoleezza Rice goes in there and says, “You will implement the president’s agenda, and this is our calling, and this is going to happen,” she had better keep an eye on her back. Now, it’s a good thing it’s the president that has her back, because he does, just like the president has Rumsfeld’s back. But I’m going to tell you, she nevertheless, she’s going to be pulling knives out of her back starting this afternoon after what she said to some of these people. You’re going to see. You say, “Well, Rush, how will this manifest itself?” Oh, you’re going to see leaks. You’re going to see stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post about how disarray the state department is in, how utterly confused people are, how nobody is getting their work done, how Condi is in over her head, people can’t get into her office even though her door is open, that the careerists are stunned at her lack of sophistication. You’ll see all of this. It won’t happen all at once but little stories will be parceled out, and there are many reasons for it. One is to undercut her. Another is to undercut the president and his agenda. Another is to undercut her political aspirations, and another is the liberals in the state department trying to save themselves by using their accomplices and allies. Now, I’m just warning you this is going to happen. This is huge, huge stuff.
I don’t know how many of you — and I’m just throwing it out as a possibility, because I used to be this way. I don’t know how many of you actually look at the state department and think, “Yep, it’s all oriented and populated by people who want us to win against the bad guys, and it’s all populated by people who think that we should win against the bad guys.” It’s not, folks. It’s not. Just like in the Department of Education, no matter who the president is, you got people in there who are hell-bent on doing nothing other than spending money. To hell with test scores, to hell with results. Just spend money and in fact empower the teachers unions. In fact, you got a lot of people in government whose sole existence is to make sure the government stays as big as it can, as relevant as it can in every day life. And they’re in all of these departments and institutions, and that’s why this presidency and this second term presidency is so dynamic, important, and controversial. I mean, Reagan may have challenged this with his speeches, and he may have challenged this with his behavior and so forth, but I don’t — somebody will have to correct me on this if I’m wrong — but I don’t think George Schultz, when he was secretary of state, would walk into the state department and say to them what Condoleezza Rice has said today.
Nothing against George Schultz, now, don’t misunderstand. I’m just saying this is something that is new; it is revolutionary in terms of the way that bureaucracy exists and handles itself on a daily basis. So just keep a sharp eye, because you’re going to see these leaks and you’re going to see these leaks resulting in newspaper stories, and it won’t be long before the state department is out of control, the state department is out of control, she’s gotta go, and she’ll be called back to the hill for testimony on all this. New York Times, Washington Post run the story, and Biden and Leahy will say we can’t put up with this or whoever Biden and whoever else in the committee, and we’ll need to get to the bottom of it. Kennedy, “We’ll need to get to the bottom of this, find out what’s going on. We’ve never had the state department in this bad of shape,” and so the word of journalists will suffice as an official report. And that’s the scheme, folks, this is how the Democrats work: Lob charges, investigate the charges, and keep lobbing charges, investigating those charges, and just keep investigations going, and the whole purpose of the investigation is for the television pictures of the investigation, designed to make the American people think we got an incompetent bunch of boobs in this administration who don’t know what they’re doing. Democrats out there trying to save the day. This is predictable. Mark my words, Mr. Snerdley. Mark down this date on the calendar. All this and more is on tap for Condoleezza Rice easily within this year.
END TRANSCRIPT


Read Rush’s Original Coverage…
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