This is not that big a deal except this. When these people in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, are getting mad at the Breck Girl, you know you are in deep doo-doo. They ought to be so accommodating and understanding. I mean, the Breck Girl’s their guy. This cannot bode well for the Breck Girl. If his own supporters — and I’m basing the fact that they’re in the same geographic — and I know what Chapel Hill is. I mean, that’s not good news. By the way, our microphones were there when that poverty tour started today. We have that handy. We played it in the first hour. Here’s how the Edwards poverty tour actually started.
(Playing of John Edwards poverty tour spoof.)
That’s how it started. Oh, what a great bumper tune to come up in the rotation. ‘Stupid Girl.’ Okay, the New York Times reports today that the Edwards campaign lined up more than 40 news organizations for the poverty tour and reporters and the Edwardses will travel in a chartered jet. They were on Good Morning America today to discuss the poverty tour at town halls. Nobody’s asking him about poverty. He’s making this a big issue and on Good Morning America today they didn’t ask him much about poverty; asked him about the war and other things. There’s a professor in this story. ‘Dennis J. Goldford, a professor of political science at Drake University in Des Moines, said most people who turn out to vote do not think of themselves as poor and do not identify with the message. ‘Even if they may be poor, many don’t think that they are,’ Mr. Goldford said. ‘They don’t think that he is talking to them.”
‘Painting himself as the populist among the Democratic candidates vying for the 2008 presidential nomination… Edwards was asked to share one solution to eliminating poverty. ‘If I had to pick just one, it would be to make work pay,’ Edwards said. Three ways to do that, Edwards said, are to raise the national minimum wage, increase the earned income tax credit and allow workers to organize unions and collectively bargain for better wages. … Asked about improving education, Edwards said that the government needed to make a bigger investment in early childhood education and give incentive pay to the best teachers, especially ones who worked in low-income rural and inner-city areas.’ Make work pay. We’ve already had our fun with that. You know what we need to do, here’s the line. We need to make work pay you what work pays Edwards.
You know people are going to get the wrong idea about this. We could do a poverty tour and cover much more ground than the Breck Girl, and that’s just have you people go out in the blue states. What we need to do is focus on blue state poverty, where the Democrats have been running these cities and running these towns where the leftists and the liberals have been in total control, and then send those of you who live out there, in those blue states and blue cities into areas that you consider to be underprivileged or whatever, and take pictures. Don’t do it yet because we got no way to receive the pictures, but then send the pictures, we’ll post them on our website and do our own virtual poverty tour and have far more impact, and point out where it is. Hate to tell you, but New Orleans has been run by Democrats for as long as there’s been New Orleans. Well, aside from when the French ran the place. But they’re probably a bunch of socialists, too, back then. Bottom line is that there is poverty out there, and we’ve had poverty program after poverty program after poverty program, and now we got a presidential candidate whose idea to solve it is to make work pay. Let’s listen to a couple sound bites from Good Morning America today. Diane Sawyer said, ‘The president says that you either think it’s lost or victory is still possible. Do you think victory is still possible?’ You got this question on Good Morning America on his poverty tour.
RUSH: Such shortsightedness. Just dense. ‘Next question, if I can, about terrorism, Breck Girl. At one point you suggested the war on terror as a phrase is a slogan used by the administration. Aren’t we in a war on terror in America?’
EDWARDS: What I was saying, and I stand by it, is the president and this administration have used this term, global war on terror, to justify everything they do, ranging from the war in Iraq to Guantanamo to torture to illegal spying on the American people, and what I have said is, is terrorism is a very serious threat and an immediate threat, it absolutely is. And as president I would go after these terrorists, find them and stop them and keep the American people safe.
RUSH: How?
EDWARDS: But what’s been missing is any sort of long-term strategy to undermine the forces of terrorism. Global poverty, spread of disease, all those things that contribute to the efforts of terrorists to recruit.
RUSH: This is pretty dangerous because he hasn’t the slightest clue. Those doctors in Great Britain tried to blow up the car, the airport and the nightclub, did not come from poverty. Bin Laden and Zawahiri do not come from poverty. This is an ideological enemy that we’ve got. They have a vision, and they get these young kids as soon as they’re born and they start filling them with rage and hate and so forth, and that’s how they recruited. This idea that we’re creating all these people because we’re not doing enough to stop world poverty, if this were true, every poor person would be the biggest criminal on the face of the earth, and it would have been the case throughout human history. It’s not the case.
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