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Algore ’92 on the Iraq Threat

by Rush Limbaugh - Jun 12,2007

RUSH: You’ve got to hear this. Algore, September 29th, 1992 at the Center for National Policy. He is then Democrat vice presidential nominee. Algore is on the campaign trail, and he was speaking again to the Center for National Policy about the George H. W. Bush Iraq policy as vice president and president. We have three sound bites. Here’s the first.

ALGORE: Bush deserves heavy blame for intentionally concealing from the American people the clear nature of Saddam Hussein and his regime and for convincing himself that friendly relations with such a monster would be possible and for persisting in this effort far, far beyond the point of folly.

RUSH: You really believe this?

ALGORE: Throughout this period, Saddam’s atrocities continued. In March of 1988, Saddam used poison gas on the Kurdish town of Halabja, brutally murdering some 5,000 innocent men, women, and children. And none of us can ever forget the pictures of their bodies, of parents trying to shield their infants, even in death —

RUSH: Hold it a second. Stop the tape. You’ve forgotten about it. It doesn’t matter to you at all now. It didn’t exist. This is incredible. Here’s the rest of this bite.


ALGORE: — that were in our news media and around the world. The Iran-Iraq war then ended in August of 1988, and Iraq had not prevailed, but neither had it been defeated. As a result, you would think that the administration would give our policies a second look to see if they should be altered. But the Reagan-Bush administration never hesitated even when the news became much, much worse.

RUSH: This is not an impersonator. This is genuine and legitimate from September 29th of 1992. Here’s the second of three bites that we have.

ALGORE: In January 1989 President George Bush was sworn in. Based on plentiful evidence, he had reason to know that his ongoing policy regarding Iraq was already malfunctioning badly. Just last week we learned of a memorandum written in March of that year, just two months after his inauguration, to secretary of state James Baker, as Baker prepared to meet with a senior Iraqi official in which the author of the memorandum noted that Iraq continued to cooperate with terrorists, that it was meddling in Lebanon, that it was working hard at chemical and biological weapons and new missiles. These are exact quotes —

RUSH: Stop the tape! Algore. You heard it just said that James Baker and George H. W. Bush were ignoring the fact that Saddam was working with terrorists. Now the standard line of the Democrat Party today, the Drive-By Media, is there were no terrorists in Iraq prior to 9/11. We’re talking 1989, 1990 here. There weren’t any terrorists, Saddam wasn’t doing anything bad, Bush lied, Bush made it all up. This is incredible. Here’s the rest of the bite.

ALGORE: These are exact quotes from the memorandum to the administration. And most significant of all, in the same month, September of 1989, the CIA reported to secretary of state Baker and other top Bush administration officials that Iraq was clandestinely procuring nuclear weapons technology through a global network —

RUSH: Whoa, whoa, whoa — do you realize they want to impeach Dick Cheney over this? They have been trying to impeach — well, his credibility, destroy him politically over his claims that Iraq was working on nuclear weapons. Now, we’ve played for you the sound bites of Bill Clinton saying in 1998 everything that George W. Bush said about Iraq in 2002 and 2003, but this goes back to 1992. This is vice perpetrator candidate Algore running for the office, he’s on the campaign trail here. These are liberals. This is who they are. He’s laying out a real threat here, laying out a real threat, and finally somebody came along and did something about the real threat and they want to destroy the US military for succeeding. They want to make sure we don’t succeed any further and they want to destroy the president who actually acted on these claims that everybody knew were true. Here’s the rest of this bite.

ALGORE: — of front companies. Did all of this make any impression at all on President Bush? Did his judgment on foreign policy come into play when he was told that this nation, with a record of terrorism continuing was making a sustained, concerted effort to acquire weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical, and biological? Well, evidently not.

RUSH: Yeah, apparently didn’t make any difference to you when you and Clinton got in the White House because you didn’t do anything about it, either. I know this is the campaign trail, folks, but you don’t get a pass for lying this big and contradicting yourself this much. This is utter dishonesty, it is utter hypocrisy and I’m just going to suggest to you that when you’ve got somebody as deranged as this, Albert Arnold Algore, you’ve got to take into account now what he’s saying about global warming. How can you believe anything somebody like this happens to say? Here’s the third bite in our troika.

ALGORE: The text of NSD 26 blindly ignores the evidence already at the administration’s disposal of Iraqi behavior in the past regarding human rights, terrorism, the use of chemical weapons, the pursuit of advanced weapons of mass destruction. Instead, it makes a heroic assumption of good behavior in the future on the basis of an interesting theory, namely, that Iraq would suddenly and completely change its ways out of a fear of economic and political sanctions. Well, it leaps from the page that George Bush, both as vice president and president, had done his utmost to make sure that no such sanctions would ever apply to Saddam Hussein. … The question is unavoidable: Why should Saddam Hussein be at all concerned about a threat of action in the future from George Bush, the same man who had resolutely blocked any such action in the past? To the contrary, Saddam had every reason to assume that Bush would look the other way no matter he did. He had already launched poison gas attacks repeatedly, and Bush looked the other way. He had already conducted extensive terrorism activities, and Bush had looked the other way. He was already deeply involved in the effort to acquire nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, and Bush knew it, but he looked the other way.

RUSH: Do you believe that? Algore demanding action on Iraq because Saddam was associating with terrorists, was gassing people with mustard gas and other chemical weapons, his own people, and was trying to develop nuclear weapons along with other weapons of mass destruction, consorting with terrorists, Lebanon, and so forth, and demanding that George H. W. Bush do something about it. Now, you just contrast this with any of the rhetoric coming out of these guys’ mouths today, ‘There was never any reason to go to Iraq, Bush lied.’ You know the drill, you know all of this. Now, there’s somebody out there trying to sound another warning, this time about Iran, and it’s Joe Lieberman. This is Sunday on Slay the Nation.

LIEBERMAN: What we did was present them with evidence that we have, that I’ve seen, that I believe is incontrovertible, that the Iranians are training and equipping Iraqi extremists to come into Iraq, and they’re killing American soldiers and Iraqis. And I think this is a very important moment, if we’re going to sit and talk with the Iranians, tell ’em what we want ’em to do, which is to stop doing that because it’s killing Americans, we can’t leave it at that. I think we’ve got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq. And to me that would include a strike into — over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers.

RUSH: All right, there’s a voice, Joe Lieberman, trying to get people to pay attention. The Iranians are doing what they’re doing and they’re telling us before they do it that they’re going to do it. But nobody wants to deal with it in his party.

RUSH: Ralph in Manhattan. Ralph, I’m glad you called, sir. You’re next on the EIB Network.

CALLER: Wow, Rush, you have no idea what a honor and how privileged I feel to be on the telephone with you right now, I gotta tell you something. I got a comment I want to make and then I really need your advice on something.

RUSH: Sure.

CALLER: I was driving down Second Avenue in the upper eighties when I was listening to the Algore sound bites.

RUSH: Yeah?

CALLER: And I was screaming at the radio and these Upper East Side liberals were looking at me as though I was a maniac. I gotta tell you something: I don’t understand for the life of me why conservatives and Republicans that are on the Hill or hold any office at all, never pull this card out and expose this hypocrisy that all these liberal Democrats prove over and over again that they’re just capable of being completely dishonest and disgustingly misleading to people.

RUSH: Oh, this is not misleading. This is outright lying, hypocrisy. This, in the real world, when people hear these bites, it’s going to discredit Algore from what he’s saying on Iraq now. This is going harm him. I’ll tell you why. You get upset that the Republicans don’t pull this stuff. I didn’t remember it, either. I didn’t remember this particular speech. There’s too much that’s gone on. This has been 15 years ago that he said this, to put this in perspective. But, let me tell you something. This YouTube and MySpace and all of these other video websites out there now, are going to reach millions and millions. People are going to see this stuff, especially when you have a powerful media figure like me pointing people to this bite on the Internet, which we are going to do via my website. Do you remember, Ralph, the ad that somebody from the Obama camp produced about Hillary and put it on YouTube, and everybody went nuts because it was a very effective ad against Mrs. Clinton, and they were trying to find out, ‘Who did this? Who did this?’ and finally we found out?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: That reached millions of people, and it wasn’t run by a political party. It wasn’t a television commercial. It was right there on the internet and on the web, and this is something that the political class is going to have to worry about and be concerned with because these Algore bites are going to be all over this country. Well, they are now, and they’re going to saturate this country. It’s young people, by the way, who spend their time on YouTube. They’re the ones that are popularizing it, uploading things to it. Now that it’s out there, there might be some wizards in the Republican Party —

CALLER: (Laughing.)

RUSH: — who might find a way to use this but they may not. If Algore doesn’t get in and if he doesn’t run, they may not. But one final thing about this, Ralph, and I know this is very frustrating to me. It probably is to you, too. When you, as a political party, have the presidency, it means that the guy in the White House leads the party. The guy in the White House thus sets the tone for the party’s behavior, and George W. Bush has not desired to do this kind of partnership at all. In this immigration bill, he’s been tougher on his friends, for example.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: So the underlings in the party, people at the RNC can’t drag this stuff out and start using it, unless Bush personally gives the go-ahead, but they know what the mind-set is. They know what the tone is, but this is new. It was just posted yesterday. Let’s see what happens with this. I think it’s going to find more coverage and more saturation than you think.

CALLER: Can I ask your advice about something?

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Okay. Listen, I want to make it short and sweet. I’m a 40-year-old guy. I grew up in New York, and a lot of my life I was dominated by drugs, crime, and I spent a lot of my years, younger years in prison. Through the grace of God, I’m a hard-working guy, I’m a loving husband. I have a stepdaughter that’s in Baghdad right now, and I became politically aware and I’m a hard-core conservative. I’m on my way to going to broadcasting school now, and I want to do conservative radio. I just want to know what advice you could give me to help guide my path.

RUSH: I am not joking about this: start calling radio talk shows. Some program director will hear you and think you can host your own show.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: It happens.

CALLER: I do call.

RUSH: Believe it or not, it happens. The conventional route — the one that people from my era did — is you start in a small town, you get experience, you get seasoned, you learn the various skills of actually doing a broadcast. There’s much more to it than just content, although that’s key. That’s the main thing. But there are some other things that you have to learn. But you have to be willing to take whatever job you can get and you have to be willing to apply, and you know what you could do? I haven’t suggested this to anybody, but the websites out there, you can start your own website and do a podcast of your own and then try to get people listening to it, get experience doing it, you know, 20 or 30 minutes a day, or whatever length of time you wanted to do, and just start doing it. If this is what you want to do, find a forum, find a place, and start doing it. Set up your own podcast on the Internet; start calling radio talk shows, and pretend you’re the host, but don’t be disrespectful to the host.

CALLER: (Laughing.) Never!

RUSH: And then continue to drive down Second Avenue in the eighties and scream out your window at liberals (laughing) and see for yourself what their reaction to you is going to be if you ever get on the radio.

CALLER: I abuse ’em. I abuse ’em in personal arguments all the time. From your lips to God’s ears I really appreciate it.

RUSH: My pleasure. Ralph, have a great one out there. Thanks much.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay, the YouTube link of Algore from September 1992 in which he blames George H. W. Bush for not taking Saddam seriously because of his weapons of mass destruction and his consorting with terrorists, is now posted. It’s a YouTube video, it’s nine and a half minutes, and we’ve got the link posted at www.RushLimbaugh.com. It’s on the free side, so anybody can access it. I’ve been thinking about this here during the commercial break. Ought this not disqualify Algore from the Nobel Peace Prize? Algore, as you know, is my number one competitor. I, too, have been nominated for the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize. I have done more for liberty and freedom and free markets and entrepreneurship and all this than Algore has in his whole life, and he’s been nominated because of this global warming hoax, plus he’s running around ripping George Bush all to shreds. Isn’t that the point? We’re going to send this video over to the Nobel Committee. He’s on the board of directors at Apple, Incorporated, formerly Apple Computer. You know, this ought to disqualify Algore for the Nobel Peace Prize. He was calling for ‘hostilities.’ He was asking for there to be a declaration of hostilities. He wanted war against Saddam Hussein running in the 1992 presidential campaign for vice perpetrator. No ‘global test,’ no. We already had the evidence. We had the intel. We knew it. We had seen some of it. We knew the people had been gassed, the Kurds. No global test. No going to the UN. He was beating up on George H.W. Bush. This is after the first Gulf War that we had won, and they were just flipping. I know it’s campaign mode, but we didn’t go all the way to Baghdad to get Saddam out of there, they were just trying to talk about the incompetence of George H. W. Bush and his administration.

END TRANSCRIPT

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