RUSH: The president went back to television today. He had a news conference outside in the Rose Garden today. Here’s a portion of what the president said.
THE PRESIDENT: The Democrats in Congress continue to pursue their bills, and now they have left Washington for spring recess without finishing the work. Democrat leaders in Congress seem more interested in fighting political battles in Washington than providing our troops what they need to fight the battle in his Iraq. If Democrat leaders in Congress are bent on making a political statement, then they need to send me this unacceptable bill as quickly as possible when they come back. I’ll veto it, and then Congress can get down to the business of funding our troops without strings and without delay.
RUSH. Right. Not as forceful as the president could have been, but he’s still out there basically telling these people, ‘Look, stop the theatrics. Just get the bill up here so I can veto it so we can move on.’ Meanwhile, Dingy Harry is saying, ‘Hey, you know, not only are we going to not do that, we’re going to cut the funding and we’re going to set a troop level. We’re going to do both things,’ Dingy Harry said. If he doesn’t have the votes he’s going to keep trying for it. So they’ve cast their lot, and the president understandably put the responsibility for this on the Democrats.
THE PRESIDENT: The bottom line is this. Congress’ failure to fund our troops on the front lines will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines, and others could see their loved ones headed back to the war sooner than they need to. That is unacceptable to me, and I believe that it is unacceptable to the American people. Congress’ most basic responsibility is to give our troops the equipment and training they need to fight our enemies and protect our nation. They’re now failing in that responsibility, and if they do not change course in the coming weeks the price of that failure will be paid by our troops and their loved ones.
RUSH: And one more with the president again telling the Democrats: stop the theatrics.
THE PRESIDENT: I think the voters in America want Congress to support our troops who are in harm’s way. They don’t want politicians in Washington telling our generals how to fight a war. There’s been a political dance going on here in Washington. They need to come off their vacation, get a bill to my desk, and if it’s got strings and mandates and withdrawals and pork, I’ll veto it and we can get down to business of getting this thing done, and we can do it quickly. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time. If we get the bill, get the troops funded, we can go about our business of winning this war.
RUSH: So the president obviously believes the Democrats here are just engaging in theatrics. He thinks that that’s what they’re doing. ‘Okay, you got the game out of the way. You got the theatrics done. Come back and give me the bill so we can get going on it.’ I don’t know if he actually thinks that. That’s how he sounds, and I think if he does believe it, he misunderstands them. I can’t believe that. I can’t believe he misunderstands their intent. They own defeat! They are wedded to it. Folks, I keep telling you this. (I hate so sound like a broken record.) They cannot afford victory politically. They cannot allow it to happen. They are they are dead serious. By the way, that last bite was in response to a question from David Gregory, and the question was this. ‘You said the Democrats are undercutting troops the way they’ve voted. They’re obviously trying to assert more control over foreign policy. Isn’t that what the voters have elected them to do in November?’ Bush didn’t answer that. But clearly that’s not what voters elected them to do, and I’m not going to waste time here going through the analysis of the November election results, but the Democrats did not campaign on that.
They didn’t campaign on anything, and yet they’re out there claiming a mandate. Look, it’s this simple. If that’s what the election has been about, the president wouldn’t have the fortitude to stand up to it, if the election had been about that, getting out of Iraq. He’s recognized Democrat electoral victories in a number of other areas. He’s having meetings with them and this sort of thing, and you wouldn’t have as many Republicans holding out. The Republicans have counted votes. They have a letter, a promissory letter from 154 Republicans in the House to the president to sustain his veto, and that’s plenty needed to sustain the veto. So, I don’t know. It’s just a golden opportunity here. These people are not engaged in theatrics. It’s time to hit them hard on the fact that this is serious stuff! It’s time to hit ’em on the fact that they are attempting to secure the defeat of the United States and the United States Military, not only in the Iraqi theater, but also in the entire war on terror. You know, I got a lot of e-mail notes last night from people who are watching last night’s episode of ’24.’
A couple people sent me notes and said, ‘I’m afraid the show is jumping the shark.’
I said, ‘What do you mean, jumping the shark? Where did it jump the shark?’
‘Well, the evil Russian guy, Gredenko cutting off his arm in order to get rid of the isotope they’d injected to track him.’
I said, Come on! That’s pretty accurate portrayal of the kind of commitment we face in these people.’
Somebody else said, ‘No, I think they jumped the shark when they lit off the nuke in episode four.’
I said, ‘Well, I don’t think they’ve jumped the shark on this show, ’24,’ by any stretch of the imagination.’
Even though this person thought that they jumped the shark by lighting off the nuke on episode four, he said, ‘It was still a good thing to show the American people what’s possible.’
I wrote back, and I said, ‘You’re missing the whole point here. In the first place, the Democrats and the Drive-By Media have done a bang-up job of convincing a whole slew of Americans there is no war on terror. 9/11 was an isolated, episodic event, and it doesn’t portend anything. We haven’t had an attack on this country since 9/11. That was 2001. This is 2007, and we’re basically five and a half years away from that attack, approximately, and a lot of people have wanted to forget it and have been able to forget it because of the lack of an attack and the way that the whole Iraq war is being portrayed by the Drive-Bys and the Democrats.’
I think they’re looking at ’24’ now just as a television show. They’re judging it on the basis of a television show. I don’t think people are watching ’24’ right now in the guise of understanding what could happen or what is possible in this country. I’m serious. I do think a lot of people in this country wanted to forget it because it’s traumatic, and we don’t show the pictures of it very often. You couple that with the way the Democrats and the Drive-Bys have been talking about the whole business. We don’t belong in Iraq. It’s now our fault, the Brits are saying, that the Iranians took these 15 hostages. It’s always our fault! It’s exactly what I told you Friday: We’re the big guys.
They created a burning inferno, brought down two buildings, 220 stories of buildings, in a fireball that was thousands of degrees, and people have found a way to forget it. Now, I’m a little off on a tangent here, but the bottom line is that the Democrats are invested in the concept of obliterating 9/11 from as many memories as possible and convincing as many Americans as possible there’s no need for a war on terror — and in fact, the war on terror is causing Muslims to hate us, and then if there are any future attacks, it’s going to be because of Bush. That’s what’s being set up here. That’s why I don’t think what the Democrats are engaging in is theatrics. I don’t think that Dingy Harry or Nancy Pelosi or any of these people are engaged in theatrics at all. We’re seeing them as they really are! They are telling us who they really are. They’re not actors on a stage. These people are emboldened. They’re feeling confident, all kinds of self-esteem. They’re unabashed in showing us who they really are and what their objectives are, and we haven’t even gotten to Nancy Pelosi and Syria.
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RUSH: You gotta hear this. On CNN today, anchor Tony Harris is talking to David Rodham Gergen, and he says, ‘What are your general thoughts and impressions of what the president had to say this morning in his press conference?’
GERGEN: Most administrations in the past, knowing a showdown was coming, people would start angling for, ‘Okay, after the showdown, how do we get together? How do we compose our differences, reconcile our differences and go on?’ Most presidents you see at this point when they’re as weak as this, become agile. They begin moving around. ‘How do I maneuver out of this situation? How do I maneuver out of this corner?’ This president is not trying to do that.
HARRIS: I think you’re right on that one.
RUSH: Well, thank you, Tony. Tony Harris, the anchor at CNN, ‘I think you’re right about that,’ David Rodham Gergen. Here’s the thing, folks. What is the compromise? David Rodham Gergen is very, very aghast here that Bush is so confrontational when he’s so weak, and he’s not working on a compromise. Somebody tell me: how in the hell do you compromise between defeat and victory? Where’s the middle ground between the two? The only way I see it is, if you want victory, you gotta give up victory and you’ve gotta compromise with defeat. Maybe you won’t want to go with defeat as soon as the Democrats want it. Maybe what you say is, ‘Okay. Uh, uh, uh, we’ll lose in two years or three instead of next March. Instead of a year from now, let us lose in two years.’ This is like negotiating on the minimum wage, although the stakes are greater here. Defeat and victory, I don’t know where the compromise is. Democrats want three bucks an hour to increase the minimum wage, and the Republicans says, ‘Well, I’ll give you a buck and a half.’
Democrats say, ‘Okay, deal,’ and everybody says, ‘Yay! Yay! Kumbaya! We got compromise.’ We have no compromise. We have a Republican cave-in when that happens. You accept the Democrat premise. Well, right here David Rodham Gergen and everybody else, wants Bush to accept the Democrat premise. That’s what they mean by compromise: accept defeat. ‘You’re defeated, Mr. President. You don’t have any support. The American people are against you. Nobody on Capitol Hill’s got your back. You gotta give up. You gotta admit defeat. You have to allow the United States to lose this. That’s what the American people want.’ I’m so sick and tired of Democrats running around saying, ‘The American people want X. The American people want Y.’ How do they know what the American people want? You know, these broad-brush strokes like this like this are offensive to me. Anyway, I don’t know where the compromise — and Gergen knows this. Gergen is a relatively smart guy.
They’re all advocating and trying to pressure Bush to ‘compromise’ and admit defeat and secure it so that the Democrats won’t get the blame for it. You can’t take that out of the equation.
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RUSH: Pat, Chicago, Illinois, on WLS. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Oh, mega dittos, Rush. I’m
RUSH: Well, I appreciate that. Thanks for the call.
CALLER: My point is that I was thinking about how much the Al-Qaeda and Democrats have in common, when the Democrats tenaciously pursue the Republican
RUSH: Well, now, some people are going to —
CALLER: I don’t care!
RUSH: — blanch at a comparison of Pelosi and the Democrats to Al-Qaeda.
CALLER: Yeah, well (laughing).
RUSH: Well, the Democrats haven’t blown up any buildings yet. Some of their supporters did in the sixties, but they haven’t done any of that.
CALLER: Well, just their tenacity, just their, you know, stuff that just doesn’t make any sense. They’re going after Gonzales for nothing.
RUSH: No, no, that makes total sense if you understand who they are. It makes total sense. (sigh) I’m up against it on time here coming up to the next break, but ever since Watergate, the Democrats’ lesson that they think they learned is, that the route to power is via scandal in the Republican Party: creating it as often as possible, lying about it if necessary, creating in the minds of as many Americans as possible that Republican administrations and individuals are corrupt, and do that rather than run on the things they actually believe, which they didn’t do in November. They ran that trick again just as they have frequently, and they try to constantly since Watergate. One thing you said, they are tenacious. Here’s the best way I can describe this. You and I, we go to the work every day, and we finish work, and most of us try to leave work at the office as much as possible and have other things going on in life, our kids (well, your kids. I, whew, have none) and your grandkids, whatever. I know works takes lot of time, and some people don’t get away from it as much as they would like, but you still try. Most people are not scheming 24/7 about personal advancement or whatever. There’s a balance.
Now, the Democrats — and Republicans are the same way, I’m convinced — in Washington, these people are pit bulls, the Democrats. They, 24/7, are plotting. They are coordinating. Your word was ‘tenacious.’ They know they have the Drive-By Media as willing accomplices. So there’s a lot of coordination if not direct, it’s implicit. They are constantly, when leave capital, they go home. They have meetings. They go to the bar. They go wherever, and they plot the next day’s strategy and they plot the day after that and they plot the week and they plot the year. They have meetings with people, advise them on the right words to use. Republicans go home and they do whatever they do. It’s a different mind-set, and the reason for it is that Democrats and liberals require for anything they want to happen, to have an iron-fisted control of government. It is their dream. It is their passion to wholly control and run the government. Republicans have no such dream. The thing they want to do with government is limit it and restrain it. They don’t want to populate it and become part of the bureaucracy. That’s one of the differences. That’s the tenacity that you’re talking about. It’s their lives. Everything they do is oriented toward gaining and holding and amassing their power, and their strategery for accomplishing that is to destroy as many Republicans as possible, not just defeat them.
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RUSH: RUSH: Our hero, Vice President Dick Cheney yesterday was in Birmingham, Alabama, and when you listen to this, see if you can find something in here that… What’s the way to put this? Well, the vice president is making an incorrect assumption.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It’s time the self-appointed strategists on Capitol Hill understood a very simple concept. You cannot win a war if you tell the enemy when you’re going to quit. The fact is that the United States Military answers to one commander-in-chief in the White House, not 535 commanders-in-chief on Capitol Hill.
RUSH: All right, now what’s the flaw in what the vice president just said? I’ll tell you what it is. ‘You cannot win a war if you tell the enemy when you’re going to quit.’ The flaw is his assumption that the Democrats want to win the war. They don’t want to win it! Folks, if they cared about winning the war, they wouldn’t be doing any of what they’re doing. Now, I know what the vice president is trying to do. He’s not actually talking to the Democrats here. He’s speaking to his audience and whoever else happens to hear his remarks, and in that sense it’s a brilliant statement: ‘You can’t win a war when you tell the enemy when you’re going to quit.’ He’s calling the Democrats quitters, and he’s making no bones about it. They own defeat. He’s calling them quitters, and that’s actually a very simple word to convey to the American people about the Democrats and their objectives here.