RUSH: I’ll tell you, folks, it’s another one of these days. I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone. I’m watching Kofi Annan on TV address the United Nations
Anyway, we’ve got audio sound bites here that you will simply not believe. (
Martin Peretz is the publisher of The New Republic. This guy, just so you know if you don’t know, this is one of Al Gore’s staunchest buddies and staunchest allies. Now, the New Republic is not as liberal as it used to be, but it still tends that way, which makes this even more interesting. This is actually on the New Republic’s blog called The Plank. To set this up, I want to remind you that I mentioned a couple times this week that the state department
They just issue the warnings, and everybody has been talking about, ‘Where’s the Bush administration been? Why weren’t we warned?’ Well, it turns out they
“But people who still don’t take its advice have only themselves to blame. Or they don’t watch television. But the four statements of foreboding that came before — I haven’t gone further back than November 2004 — don’t make Lebanon seem at all inviting, and the insistent travelers — come to think of it — also have only themselves to blame. In fact, each of the warnings tells you that U.S. air carriers are not permitted to use Beirut International Airport and that the Lebanese carrier, Middle East Airlines, is not allowed to operate in the United States. (Sort of like the warning at Logan Airport warning travelers not to go to Lagos.) The warnings also caution you about suicide bombs, terrorist activities, land mines, unexploded ordnance, and a general atmosphere of violence, predictable and unpredictable.
“The reader is especially warned against visiting the southern neighborhoods of Beirut, southern Lebanon (especially Sidon), Tripoli, the Bekaa Valley, etc. Why families would take their kids for long summer vacations into this environment is beyond me,” and this is not me talking. This is Marty Peretz. “But many have, and a lot of them have been whining on television about how the U.S. government didn’t rescue them promptly (and comfortably) from the touristic mayhem they put themselves in on their own volition and despite the feds’ detailed descriptions of general and specific menace in the country. Many of those who bitched for the cameras seem to me to be especially petulant, even those who have already arrived in Cyprus.
“They complained about accommodations and the shortage of food, as if they were on a Greek Island cruise boat suddenly deserted by the chef. No sense of individual responsibility either for having put themselves in harm’s way despite [the state department’s] effort to keep them at home … or maybe go to Venice instead,” and keep in mind this is the state department is the liberals’ pet federal agency. They love the state department, and the state department did what it was supposed to do — and these people still went, and they still complained about it and they still got all upset when there wasn’t enough sufficient response to get them out of there. I asked yesterday: “Why in the world would anybody with half a brain go there, on a vacation?” Anyway, let’s go audio sound bite #2, because this is at a live press conference after the first plane of Americans from Lebanon landed. This is David Merhige, who goes by the name of “Goldie.” He’s a musician from the East Village in New York, and here’s a portion of “Goldie”‘s remarks.
IDIOT: The whole world is watching George Bush to see what he would say. It seemed like such an atrocity. I don’t know if any Hezbollah died. I — I — I heard maybe five have died and there’s probably at this point 300 Lebanese dead and — and when he said Israel has a right to defend itself when there just doesn’t look like a defensive maneuver at all. This is a major offensive going on. I don’t feel great to be back. I mean, it’s, uh, knowing what’s going to happen, you know, after three days and after all the foreigners are out, I just don’t feel great. And for some reason nothing can stop this. And I don’t know why and, uh, it’s obviously just a script that everyone’s — the whole world is playing along with.
RUSH: A total glittering jewel of colossal ignorance, an absolute lamebrain, an idiot, a stupid, dumb, uninformed, lazy, fat American who hasn’t the slightest clue what he’s talking about, ends up in a live press conference complaining about…
MITCHELL: The American public may not have too much of an, uh, appetite as this progresses for some of the visual evidence of what’s happening on the ground over there, because clearly there is a disproportionate level of casualties at least. The, uh, the situation in Lebanon is proportionally worse than what is going on in Israel just in terms of the numbers of people who have died and been wounded.
RUSH: Right! Right! That’s exactly what’s supposed to happen in a war, Andrea! You are a major foreign affairs correspondent for a major American network, and you sound ill-informed, uninformed and na?ve. The disproportionality of casualties? We have dealt with that this week. Let me give you the stats that I announced earlier. I did some lengthy research: 92,000 battle deaths in the Pacific theater suffered by America in World War II. Japanese battle deaths, not counting civilians in the bombings of Hiroshima (or Hir-oshima, for you elites) and Nagasaki, 1.59 million Japanese battle deaths, compared to 92,000 American battle deaths.
We’re supposed to have tit-for-tat here? If X-number of Lebanese or Hezbollah die, then the same number of Israelis are supposed to die? Where in the world, how in the world, do these people get these jobs? Folks, this is ignorance that is on display and on parade that ought to embarrass every management personnel and every editor that works at NBC! I’m going to take a quick time-out here because, you know, I’m probably going to go a little far and say something I shouldn’t say. Well, I can’t do that because I’m not afraid of what I shouldn’t say or should say but it’s amazing to watch this, and when you realize… You have to understand the reason I get so exorcised about this is that the Drive-By Media in this country still has a lot of sway and impact over people.
There are plenty of idiots in this country, as you well know. There are plenty of uneducated, uninformed, idiotic, duped idiots in this country and they believe this rotgut and they’ve all attended Conflict Resolution at some worthless high school, kindergarten or college, and they’re all out there like this idiot ‘Goldie’ who just got back upset that he had to leave, probably complaining about how slowly they got him out of there in the first place. Those are the kind of people… How do you think a guy like Goldie ends up as stupid as he is or as uninformed as he is because he’s watching the Drive-By Media who is as narrowly focused as they have ever been! Their action line is what it is, their template is what it is, and in the process they
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RUSH: One more audio sound bite, and then time to put this in perspective again. Now, what we have here, a new talking point of the anti-Israel, pro-terrorist left and other assorted members. It’s amazing how this stuff happens, but it does, and when it does, we are the first to notice. We put together a montage. We have here Katrina vanden Heuvel, Hurricane Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation, Ahmed Younis of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, Pat Buchanan, the Arab journalist Abdel Bari Atwan, and the Hearst newspaper columnist Helen Thomas.
HEUVAL: What Israel is doing today with a collective punishment of the Lebanese and Palestinian people…
YOUNIS: The Palestinian people who have received a collective punishment.
BUCHANAN: This is collective punishment of an entire people for the sins of terrorists that they did not commit.
ATWAN: There is a collective punishments [sic] practiced by the Israelis against, uhhh, a peaceful country like Lebanon.
HELEN THOMAS: …a collective punishment against all of Lebanon and Palestine.
RUSH: So we’re back to this: a ‘collective punishment.’ This is what we get with a diverse and wide-ranging media. We have them all saying the same thing when it comes to controversial stories. Let me deal with this by first sharing with you a brief bit of a brilliant piece today by Bob Tyrrell at the American Spectator Online. ‘To the grizzled and disheveled stalwarts of Hezbollah and Hamas, may I say you did it to yourselves.
“And what did you donkeys do? You tunneled under the Israeli borders to infiltrate Israel and kill innocent civilians. You established an infrastructure of missiles to rain down destruction on Israeli cities that were at peace, providing security and prosperity for both Jews and Arabs. You captured Israeli soldiers in an unprovoked attack.
“The same bellicosity afflicts the allies of these terrorists in Syria and Iran. The brutes in these governments are pitiless and belligerent tyrants. Listening to their sophistries about their need for nuclear power or their desire for a peaceful world puts me in mind of all the irenic poetry of the late Herr Hitler back when things were good for him in the middle 1930s. It all ended badly — for everyone. When in May 1940 Winston Churchill became prime minister, he thought himself a failure. He recognized that all his admonitions against the Nazis in the previous decade had proved futile. Now only world war would bring peace.”
This idea that there is a “collective punishment” going on, people have forgotten what happened here — and it didn’t happen that long ago, and it happened under Ariel Sharon. The argument to really understand this is really not complicated. The argument has always been among the enemies of Israel: “Give up land, and you will have peace. Give up land and you will have peace.” The Israelis have given up land, and they haven’t had peace, because “land for peace” is bogus.
Resolution 1559? I talked about it yesterday. That UN Security Council resolution, for all the good that body is worth, was designed and written and commanded Hezbollah to disband, to get out of southern Lebanon, in exchange for Israel getting out, and of course Israel got out, and they got out of Gaza, the idea being that there would be peace. Israel keeps expressing the desire for peace. They keep going along with all this and they always get backstabbed and they know they’re going to get backstabbed, and what Tyrrell wrote here is exactly correct. Israel gets out of the area of Gaza and the areas where Hezbollah is, and Hezbollah comes after them and is launching
And somehow we have people in this country who talk about the collective punishment of the Lebanese and Palestinian people. Well, let’s blame who’s really responsible. Who is
These are the people that put bombs on their own kids, for crying out loud! These are the people that strap bombs on their own kids and send them out to
One of them is, though, that it’s considered to be a powerful nation, and all these surrounding little Arab regimes and terrorist regimes are the victims, “and it’s just not fair that Israel can respond with such force, and this is a fair. It’s disproportionate. It’s not proportionate. Israel should response with proportionality.” It’s absolutely asinine. All of this is asinine! I’ll tell you what about Kofi Annan and the United Nations. You know, we hear about SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative. I think the most effective anti-missile shield is located in the UN building. You talk about an SDI?
If our defense system could deflect attacks as easily as the UN can, we wouldn’t even need an SDI. Have you ever heard, for example, Kofi Annan called “a dim bulb”? Which he is. Have you ever heard the oil-for-food program called “a culture of corruption”? No, you hear George Bush called a dim bulb, and you hear Republicans labeled as being members of the culture of corruption, but you don’t hear it about the UN, which
You ever hear it? No! You hear that about Bush and Iraq, but you never hear it about the United Nations in
Yet it is above criticism! I know why. Because it’s a bunch of libs! It’s a bunch of socialist libs and dictator tyrants made up of a bunch of small-minded, small-powered little nations against the big, bad United States and its evil, evil ally, Israel — and so they are excused for all of their scandals and their corruptions and their bad plans and their idiotic statements, “Because they’re just trying to do the good thing, Rush. We’re not really supposed to analyze the results of the UN. We’re supposed to examine their good attentions, like they want to ceasefire, ceasefire, back off and so forth.” Well, they’ve never succeeded in getting one. Nothing they’ve ever done in this region has had any impact at all these been meaningful, and why everybody wants to continue to rely on them is beyond me, but I know it anyway.
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RUSH: Let me move on back to the Kofi Annan address. It was some UN body. It looked larger than the Security Council, but I didn’t see the beginning of it so I didn’t really know. I was reading the closed captioning. I was actually listening to Kofi make the speech. (“No, I will not resign.” He didn’t say that but that’s how I always recall him after the oil-for-food scandal erupted.) I listened to him talk, and he goes through the perfunctory emotions of condemning Hezbollah, but then veers into demanding that Israel stop what it is doing. He demanded that Hezbollah stop, too, but this is idiotic. What of Kofi’s duty to enforce resolutions? It’s called Resolution 1559!
It came out of his stupid, worthless United Nations, and here he is from the United Nations — Turtle Bay, it’s called — sitting up there demanding that Israel stop what it’s doing and that Hezbollah stop what it’s doing, proving (sigh) full well that the United Nations is incapable of enforcing anything. This is nothing new. It’s just the latest example. To remind you again: Israel left southern Lebanon and the UN and Lebanon were to remove Hezbollah. They haven’t done so. Now Israel has to do it! It’s no different than Saddam Hussein flipping the world the bird after 14 years and 16 resolutions to come clean on his WMD program.
After 9/11, we couldn’t afford to take the chance that he was bluffing and so Iraq happened.
It wasn’t that long ago that they hated, they despised Ariel Sharon because he was such a mad right-winger, came up with this deal, got out of Gaza, got out of the Hezbollah areas, got out of southern Lebanon. He said, “Okay, we’ll give you what you want in exchange for peace,” and there was head scratching in a lot of communities around the world, in Israel. “What’s happened to Ariel? What happened to Rabin? What happens to all these guys when they get old?”
They’ve always wanted peace, and they buy into every notion that is thrown at them under the guise of land for peace, and when they give land back, and the other nations that they give land to… They gave the Sinai back to Egypt after the Six Day War, cleaned Egypt’s clock, cleaned Syria’s clock, and cleaned the clock of Jordan, and they gave-oil-rich Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt, and the Egyptians have left them alone, and the Israelis have left them alone. The Israelis have demonstrated, “If you mean land for peace, we’ll go along with it because it’s all we want.” Well, Sharon makes the deal and now all of a sudden Hezbollah is violating it, and they’re violating it out of Gaza.
So the Israelis are having to clean up the mess that other people have made, and why this can’t be seen is quite simple:
There’s just knee-jerk reaction. Six years later — six years later, after all of this and this demand that Hezbollah disband and southern Lebanon be free, so to speak, six years later — Lebanon says they don’t have the ability to push Hezbollah out, after they promised in a UN resolution that they would and after they left the security zone! Now, this means that Lebanon doesn’t want to push Hezbollah out — and there’s a reason for it:
He’d be assassinated by somebody in Hezbollah or he’d be assassinated by somebody from Syria, but he would be assassinated. So, you know, the Lebanese government is a prisoner of terrorism, too, in a sense, and all the while, the blame continues to be focused on Israel. You want to sum up the UN operation, sum up the UN’s plan, sum up Kofi Annan’s speech for you? (Kofi impression) “Road Map to Peace, two-state solution, cessation of hostilities, restraint and peacekeepers.” He was complaining that he couldn’t get his peacekeeper force in there because his current peacekeeper force couldn’t get
The reason his peacekeeper force can’t get out of there and why he can’t send in a new batch of peacekeepers, which would be just as worthless as the present batch, is because Hezbollah is not letting anybody leave! Israel is getting blamed for that, too. Well, the Israelis are bombing these areas and killing civilians. Civilians want out of there. What if Americans who wanted out of there who failed to heed the four state department warnings in the last two years, what if the Americans were unable to leave and they were being hit by indiscriminate fire, who do you think would be blamed? George W. Bush!
Certainly not Hamas, not the people who were denying them permission to leave, not the people keeping them in the war zone! “Well, Israel shouldn’t be firing on them in the first place. Israel knows they’re civilians.” Israel knows the
Israel knows it’s at war. Israel knows it’s surrounded by enemies who would do to it what Hezbollah is doing to it if it shows the first sign of weakness. This is how you fight wars and this is how you win wars:
Attacks on civilians! Why did Truman do it? Truman did it to save American lives. We were at war. When we’re bombing the hell out of Germany in World War II, the Dresden bombing, you think that was aimed solely at military installations? We’ve got new ground rules for this now. You’re not supposed to kill civilians, and these idiot terrorists are not to idiot when it comes to this. They understand full well the political correctness and the feminization of our culture that has taken over, and they put innocent civilians in the way just like they’ve been doing in Iraq, and they get killed in a war zone, and somehow it is the fault of people who are fighting a war to try to win it: the good guys!
Which is another thing people have problems with and that’s the concept that there are good guys. Now, when you look at what’s going on, I have another serious question:
There is not
You know, I take it back, folks. I’m being too hard on them. We can go on the Security Council! I forgot! Yes, where Russia and China and France can veto whatever they want to. Meanwhile, as Russia, France and China continue to veto things that we propose, China 
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RUSH: How many of you remember seeing the movie The Untouchables, Kevin Costner and Sean Connery? There’s a scene in that movie where the Sean Connery character has a speech, and it goes something like this. He says, ‘You hurt one of our guys and we’ll put one of yours in the hospital. You put one of ours in the hospital, we’ll put one of yours in the morgue. It’s the Chicago way.’ I think Israel
Can I ask you a question? (Of course I can, I’m host. It’s my program.) Whatever happened to the Colin Powell Doctrine, ladies and gentlemen? Anybody remember what the Colin Powell doctrine was? H.R., you remember what the Colin Powell doctrine was? That’s where you go in there and you just
CALLER: Mega dittos, Rush. Great to talk with you! I just want to echo. I agree with everything you’re saying about the UN, and we should consider what kind of suffering the Lebanese would have gone through if they had actually moved to disarm and removed Hezbollah and demilitarize southern Lebanon. There’s no doubt that their suffering and their casualties would have been many times higher than it is now.
RUSH: What are you saying, Gordon, that they shouldn’t have done it, even though the UN Resolution 1559, which they agreed to, commanded them to do it?
CALLER: No, I’m saying they should have done it, but when we hear these people talk about “disproportionate suffering” and all of this, someone needs to consider how much the Lebanese would have suffered if they’d actually determined to do their job.
RUSH: You know, I understand what you’re saying, but the real question is: How much is Lebanon suffering now because they didn’t do it? They’re suffering one way or another. There’s no question they are. They’re losing a huge economic impact because of all of these rich, wealthy, lazy-bum Americans who are getting out of there now. They are losing all kinds of tourists. (I can’t believe they’ve got any by apparently they do because people are fleeing the place left and right.) Lebanese citizens are being bombed; Lebanese citizens are dying in the hostilities. What this illustrates, Gordon, really clearly to me is, the uselessness of such resolutions.
They pass these resolutions and the people involved say, aren’t we good people? “Look at our intentions, look what we stand for. We stand for demilitarization! We stand for restraint! We stand for peace,” and what ends up? Hell breaks loose.
We can create our own cocoons in which we live, and we can deny certain realities; and when they get close to us and they get close to starting to smack us upside the head. “Well, we don’t want to be reminded of these realities.” Well, this was a silly notion from the first place. If you’re going to say, “We’re going to Resolution 1559, and Lebanon is going to be responsible for getting Hezbollah out of there, and if you know at the time that Lebanon will suffer greatly and they do it,” then what’s the point in the first place? You’re going to end up where we are anyway, which takes us back to the Limbaugh Doctrine:
Peace, folks, peace doesn’t follow UN resolutions. Peace doesn’t follow UN Security Council resolutions, peace doesn’t result or follow the numerous calls for “cessation of hostilities.” Peace does not follow from sending the Red Cross in which was another brilliant idea of that
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