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RUSH: Moving on now to the war in Iraq and the column in the New York Times today that everybody who pays attention to this particular issue is talking about. It’s called, ‘A War We Just Might Win.’ It’s by Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack. O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution which is a left-leaning think tank. Kenneth Pollack, director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. So they’re both from the Brookings Institution. ‘Viewed from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.’ Oh, no, they’re not. They are fully and totally aware. That’s why they’ve been pushing to get this report done in July, to believe the interim report rather than wait for the full scheduled report in September. They know what’s going on. They know full well what’s going on, and they’re invested in the opposite. They’re invested in defeat. As we’ve discussed countless times on this award-winning program. They can’t allow this, folks.

I’m telling you, Nancy Pelosi face cracked twice today when Gordon Brown praised America as a great leader in defending the rights of free people against terrorism, and now this. Here’s what they say, second paragraph. ‘Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily ‘victory’ but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with. After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated — many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work,’ and they were no doubt demoralized by the debate going on back here.

‘Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference. But for now, things look much better than before. American advisers told us that many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once infested the force have been removed. The American high command assesses that more than three-quarters of the Iraqi Army battalion commanders in Baghdad are now reliable partners (at least for as long as American forces remain in Iraq). In addition, far more Iraqi units are well integrated in terms of ethnicity and religion. … How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.’

Now, this did not appear in the Washington Times. This did not appear in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. This didn’t appear in the Orange County Register. This appeared today in the New York Times. Something puzzling about this, the fact that the Times would run it, I think part of the reason for that is this is something they just aren’t going to be able to hide anymore. The idea here that we should not make any plans of getting out of there before the end of 2008, the presidential elections, oh that is going to send chills up and down the spines of Democrats. By the way, there was a story in the Washington Post on Saturday, ‘US push for Iraq recruits widens.’ Among the interesting things in the story was this. ‘The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, called the development of the grass-roots forces the most significant trend in Iraq ‘of the last four months or so’ and one that could help propel slow-moving efforts at national reconciliation among Iraq’s main religious sects and ethnic groups. ‘This is a very, very important component of reconciliation because it’s happening from the bottom up,’ he said in an interview Friday. ‘The bottom-up piece is much farther along than any of us would have anticipated a few months back. It’s become the focus of a great deal of effort, as there is a sense that this can bear a lot of fruit.”So on Saturday the Washington Post has a story quoting Petraeus, ‘The integration of Iraqis into the security force is working from the bottom up.’ We told you this was happening all of the past two weeks and now this column in the New York Times today which basically says this thing can be won and that the progress is undeniable. This is going to provide a real challenge for the Democrats on Capitol Hill. I’m sure they’re up to it. But, by the way, this isn’t the only barrage against them in the media. It happened on Chris Matthews’ Sunday show yesterday. Wait ’til you hear the audio I have coming up.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: For months, for years, ladies and gentlemen, we have been hearing a steady drumbeat from the Democrat Party: ‘We gotta get out of Iraq. We gotta bring the troops home. They have to be kept safe! We can’t win this war. We have lost this war. It’s a civil war. It’s sectarian violence. There is no Al-Qaeda in Iraq,’ and the Drive-By Media has echoed it every day. Every step of the way, the Drive-Bys have echoed it and they’ve gone up and they’ve dutifully asked Tony Snow and the president when they get their chats, ‘Why don’t you pull out? You know it’s not going well. You started this! You created the terrorists by going to Iraq in the first place!’ For years this has been going on, then all of a sudden, look at what’s happening the last three days. Saturday the Washington Post has a big story about what a big success we’re having bringing Iraqis into the security system from the bottom up. Petraeus says it’s the single most exciting thing he’s seeing over there. It means the Iraqis are joining forces rapidly with our side to defend themselves, defend their country. Then yesterday we had three Drive-By journalists, Kelly O’Donnell of NBC, TIME Magazine’s Mike Duffy, and CBS’ Gloria Borger on Chris Matthews’ Show saying that we can’t leave Iraq. We just can’t leave. It would be silly. Also, David Ignatius of the Washington Post. There are four Drive-Byers here. We have a montage of their comments regarding leaving Iraq.

O’DONNELL: People are beginning to learn that exiting is not easy. There are enormous costs.

MATTHEWS: (interrupting) Okay. Batter if we stay there two —

O’DONNELL: Mechanically you can’t do it.

DUFFY: — have a thousand Iraqis dying a month at the current rate. That could explode, maybe ten times as many if the US leaves.

BORGER: This is such a problem right now for the Democrats. Privately, many of them will say — and Joe Biden has even said it publicly — that you can’t withdraw overnight.

VOICE: No!

BORGER: That it would be —

MATTHEWS: (interrupting) Okay. How was —

BORGER: — dangerous for us to do.

MATTHEWS: We put it to the Matthews Meter, twelve of our regular panelists. Can Bush keep a hundred thousand troops or more in Iraq until he leaves office? It looks like he can. Eight of our group says, yes, he can.

RUSH: Matthews then asked David Ignatius, ‘What good does this Iraq war do to reduce the threat of terrorism here?’

IGNATIUS: These struggles are different fronts of the same war. The notion that, you know, a defeat —

RUSH: Stop the tape! Stop the tape and recue this. Do you realize what you just heard? Do you understand that you just heard? You heard a Drive-By Media columnist say that the war in Iraq is all part of the war on terror, that it’s not separate. He said, ‘These different fronts in the same war.’ What’s going on out there? For four years the Drive-Bys and the Democrats have done everything they can to segregate Iraq from the general war on terror. That’s what, ‘We gotta go to Afghanistan. We gotta get bin Laden! We gotta get Zawahiri. There’s going on in Iraq. There was nothing. Bush just went in there,’ blah, blah, blah. All of a sudden now, this is Saturday, this stuff on Sunday, and then this New York Times column today with these two Brookings Institution guys saying, hey, hey, hey, it’s going well over there. What’s happening here? There’s something happening. Nothing happens by coincidence in the Drive-By Media. Folks, the news is packaged and presented just like food on the shelves of a grocery store. The people that produce news, the editors that are working back there are working on the Sunday paper on Friday. They work on the Monday paper on Saturday, asking their columnists to write things and so forth. Stuff just doesn’t happen. The people that produce news have a product that they’re marketing and producing, and three days in a row now, and then this Matthews show? Here’s the full quote from Ignatius. ‘What good does this Iraq war do to reduce the threat of terrorism?’

IGNATIUS: These struggles are different fronts of the same war. The notion that, you know, a defeat to the United States and its allies in Iraq is costless in terms of the larger war against Al-Qaeda, is just wrong. I mean, you know, bin Laden said again and again, the Americans are weak; if you hit ’em hard, they’ll run away. They were hit hard in Beirut; they ran away. They were hit hard in Somalia; they ran away.

RUSH: I don’t believe that I heard this! I have been reminding everybody on this program for four years what bin Laden said, why the Clintons didn’t listen to him, and why bin Laden got the impression we pulled out of Mogadishu, Black Hawk Down. He said it on ABC! These guys have known it all along, too, Ignatius just didn’t discover this, and Gloria Borger didn’t just discover the fact that there would be a genocide massacre if we pulled out. They’ve known it for all these years. They know this stuff. So now all of a sudden they are swerving here into, well, what I could call more truthful discussions of this. Here’s one more little bite from Michael Duffy from TIME Magazine. Matthews says, ‘How will it be better if we stay there two years more than if we leave in a year?’

IGNATIUS: You get to, A, protect two clear interests the US has, keeping Al-Qaeda from having a safe haven on the border of Afghanistan, and keeping that regional war from breaking out.

RUSH: I am in stunned amazement here! I am in total incredulity. This has been the common-sense reaction to everything going on over there for four years. They’ve known it. Now all of a sudden, on the weekend of July 28th, they all of a sudden start mouthing this stuff in the Washington Post, Chris Matthews’ Show on Sunday with prime Drive-By Media players, and then the New York Times piece today. Something is going on out there.

RUSH: Edward in Greenville, South Carolina, we’ll start with you. Welcome to the program, sir.

CALLER: Oh, hey, Mike. Mike? Oh, sorry, you’re not Mike, you’re Rush. I’m so sorry. I just talked to my friend Mike.

RUSH: I have no clue who that is.

RUSH: Mark in Joplin, Missouri, welcome to the EIB Network.

CALLER: Rush, I’m afraid that they’re trying to set themselves up to take either partial credit or full credit for success in the war in Iraq. They have preached defeat for the last few years. I’m really let down, and I spoke with a man who served in Bosnia over the weekend at a high school reunion, and he as well as I were really let down with the fickleness of the American people driven by the media and by the Democrats, and now they are trying to set themselves up to take partial credit for this.

RUSH: Well, that will be interesting to see if they actually can take partial credit. We’ve got the sound bites. We have a whole archive of sound bites of the Democrats proclaiming defeat, saying it can’t be won, demanding we get out. They have proposed resolution after resolution after resolution condemning the war and demanding that Bush set a timeline for withdrawal.

CALLER: Well, Rush, don’t you have a whole archive of them saying we needed to go into Iraq?

RUSH: Yeah, we do. But they’ve abandoned that position. They saying Bush lied to them.

CALLER: Right, but now they’re… It’s just typical. They’re going to go right back. They want credit.

RUSH: You may have a point in some sense. All of this could be a warning. I think the Drive-Bys look out for the Democrats, and I think privately the Drive-Bys are a little stunned just like we all are at how close to going over the cliff on national security the Democrats are, coming up on a presidential race.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: Nothing happens by accident in the Drive-By Media, just like nothing that happens with the Clintons is coincidental. So the New York Times publishes this piece today; you’ve got the Matthews show with these elite Drive-Bys yesterday. It could be a warning. It could be a like a bugler signaling a retreat. ‘You guys better shift gears. You better move into a CYA mode. We might win this thing. You gonna have to change the way you’re talking about this.’ Now, whether they can claim credit? I know they would try. About the only think I think they could do is to claim that their unrelenting pressure on the president forced him to adopt a strategy that they knew would work. The problem is they have been talking down the surge since before it began. So, you know, if they’re out there thinking that the only thing they’ve gotta do is change their message and the Drive-Bys are going to start amplifying it and that will take care of it, they are going to make a mistake again of forgetting that there’s a whole new media out there that holds them accountable. I don’t want to make too much of this. I really am stunned at what a reversal this is, and the comments from these people on the Matthews show who have known what they said yesterday to be the case for four years, but have been out there mouthing Democrat Party talking points to the opposite.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Let’s go to the president’s press conference today on the war in Iraq, the war on terror. The new prime minister of Britain, Gordon Brown, was with the president. They had a joint news conference. An unidentified Drive-By reporter says, ‘Prime Minister Brown, you’ve talked of Afghanistan being in the front line in the war on terror. Do you believe that is harder or easier to win?’

BROWN: There is no doubt, therefore, that Al-Qaeda is operating in Iraq. There’s no doubt that we had to take very strong measures against them, and there is no doubt that the Iraqi security forces have got to be strong enough to be able to withstand not just the violence that has been between the Sunni and the Shi’a population and the Sunni insurgency, but also Al-Qaeda itself.

RUSH: What the hell is going on here? Look, I may be making too big a deal about this, but something has caused a change. This is a 180. The Drive-Bys are doing a 180. There is a dramatic turn just in the last three days on the reporting in Iraq — and it could all change tomorrow, by the way, but we’ll have to wait and see. I think they might be shaken up. You know, the New York Times did a poll last week in which they found that an increasing number of people support, today, the initial invasion of Iraq, and the New York Times was so stunned by that, they went out and did it again. They went out and re-polled, because they were stunned at their answer, and, lo and behold, they got the same answer two polls in a row. Can you imagine them being stunned? ‘Where did the public get this information? We didn’t report it! Where’s the public figuring this out? With all that we’ve done the last four years to destroy this war effort, how can it be that a larger number of people supports the initial invasion? How can this be?’ I’m at a loss here. It has happened before. It’s not unprecedented. But to really hear these guys on the Matthews show say what they said, that Iraq can’t be separated from the war on terror? You know there’s not a Democrat elected in Washington other than Lieberman who will say that, who has said it. From the moment we invaded Iraq in ’03 the argument the Democrats have launched has been, ‘What are we doing there? They lied. Cheney lied. Bush lied. There were no nukes. There were no weapons of mass destruction.’ They’re trying to erase, for their kook friends base, the fact that they all supported it or most of them did. The Drive-Bys are willing accomplices of these Democrats. It will be interesting to see if what follows from this is if these Drive-Byers start peppering Democrats with questions designed to get answers like the Drive-Bys offered on the Sunday Chris Matthews Show. ‘Senator, don’t you understand that Iraq is simply part of the larger war on terror effort? Why is it so hard for you to understand that?’ They don’t ask them that question. Let’s see if they start to now. Here’s the president, by the way. He jumped in after the answer you just heard from the British PM, Gordon Brown.

THE PRESIDENT: There’s no doubt in my mind that Gordon Brown understands that failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the security of our own countries, that failure in Iraq would embolden extremist movements throughout the Middle East, that failure in Iraq would basically say to, you know, people sitting on the fence around the region that Al-Qaeda is powerful enough to drive great countries like Great Britain and America out of Iraq before the mission is done.

RUSH: So it was a joint press conference, and by the way, the prepub we got on this was that UK was thinking of pulling out of Iraq, and then Gordon Brown shows up here today, and that’s the last thing that anybody would conclude after hearing his remarks.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: One of the things it could be — we could grasp at straws here — it could well be that since Barack is attacking Hillary on her vote for the war; it could be the Drive-Bys are circling the wagons for Hillary to make sure that vote looks good. Folks, we’re just speculating here, but I’m telling you something’s up. I know these people like every square inch of my glorious naked body.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, please indulge me on this. Something’s up out there, and I like to think through these things, and the more that I listen to the things that are constituting the difference, the more lightning-like the thoughts race around in the deep, dark crevices of my immensely fertile mind. So I want to go back and play three sound bites from the previous hour, the Chris Matthews Sunday show. This is a show that doesn’t look like Hardball at all. It’s a syndicated show that runs just like any of these other Sunday shows, the McLaughlin Group or what have you. The first thing, a montage of the various journalists that he had. He had Kelly O’Donnell of NBC, Gloria Borger, US Snooze & World Report, TIME Magazine Michael Duffy, and David Ignatius of the Washington Post. First a montage of these people, the Drive-By Media, and you’ve gotta understand now, for four years, ‘We gotta get out. We can’t win. We gotta bring the troops home.’ Whatever the Democrats have been saying, the Drive-Bys have been echoing it. So with that in mind, listen to this montage on these Drive-By Media types’ thoughts on leaving Iraq.

O’DONNELL: People are beginning to learn that exiting is not easy. There are enormous costs.

MATTHEWS: (interrupting) Okay. Batter if we stay there two —

O’DONNELL: Mechanically you can’t do it.

DUFFY: — have a thousand Iraqis dying a month at the current rate. That could explode, maybe ten times as many if the US leaves.

BORGER: This is such a problem right now for the Democrats. Privately, many of them will say — and Joe Biden has even said it publicly — that you can’t withdraw overnight.

VOICE: No!

BORGER: That it would be —

MATTHEWS: (interrupting) Okay. How was —

BORGER: — dangerous for us to do.

MATTHEWS: We put it to the Matthews Meter, twelve of our regular panelists. Can Bush keep a hundred thousand troops or more in Iraq until he leaves office? It looks like he can. Eight of our group says, yes, he can.

RUSH: Matthews then asked David Ignatius, ‘What good does this Iraq war do to reduce the threat of terrorism here?’

RUSH: It was Gloria Borger who said, ‘This is such a problem right now for the Democrats.’ Privately, many of them will say that you can’t withdraw overnight. Now, I want to take you back in my fertile mind’s memory once again. For many, many months now, I have been incredulous — we all have been — over how cemented to the concept of losing the Democrat Party has been, from Pelosi to Reid to Dick Durbin, to the leaders in both the House and the Senate. They’ve already proclaimed that we’ve lost. They’ve waved the white flag. It’s over. The surge isn’t working, pull out now, resolution after resolution after resolution. I’ve said, ‘Somewhere in this party, somewhere, there are some adults.’ Behind the scenes there have to be some adults who realize that this is death for these people. They’re McGovernizing themselves. They’re sowing the seeds of a future landslide loss. There have to be some adults in this party that understand that you cannot just keep trying to placate the fringe kooks that make up their base out there on the Internet.

So I’m wondering if what hasn’t happened is that some of these adults in the Democrat Party have gotten a hold of the Drive-Bys and said, ‘This has gone too far, and we’re going to have to pull our party back from the precipice of the cliff,’ and the Drive-Bys said, ‘Well, absolutely, you’re absolutely right.’ So this could be the result of the adults. We don’t know who they are. This could be the result of the adults talking to the Drive-Bys. You got this column in the New York Times today saying it’s going great over there, these two libs from the Brookings institute, it’s going great. There was a piece in the Washington Post on Saturday talking about how the Iraqis are joining the effort here from the bottom up, how it’s really working well, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Three days in a row, bam, bam, bam. 180 degrees different. It could be here that what’s happening is the adults in the Democrat Party have gotten to the Drive-Bys, and the Drive-Bys are now trying to send a warning to the kooks, to the kids, the Pelosis and the Reids, ‘Hey, you guys had better wake up.’

There’s also this possibility, and don’t think that this is out of the realm of possibility because the Drive-Bys think this is huge. They won’t let go of the story, the kerfuffle between Obama and Hillary following the last debate. When Obama said that he would meet with the thugs, he would meet with the dictators, he would meet with the tyrants — he won’t go on Fox News, and neither will Hillary, but they’ll meet. Hillary said, (paraphrasing) ‘That’s naïve. You don’t elevate the office of thugs by giving them an audience with the president of the United States.’ So Obama is fighting back by saying, (paraphrasing) ‘Well, look at you. Look at your vote to authorize the war in Iraq.’ So Obama is really hammering Hillary on that, and the Drive-Bys are watching this. This is not part of the script. So part of this reversal here could be to eventually show how prescient Hillary was and how full of courage and guts she was to not be talked out of supporting her vote, not renouncing her vote. She has not done that. She’s stuck with it. She has said Bush lied, I got snookered and so forth, but she hasn’t withdrawn her support for her own vote like all the other Democrats have done. It could well be that Obama is raising a lot of money, providing a little threat out there, this is circling the wagons around Hillary. Any number of possibilities.

It could also be this. The Drive-Bys are in Iraq. They see the surge working. They know they can’t cover it up anymore with the new media on the case, too. They can’t make it look like a blithering defeat. So they’re letting it out. It doesn’t serve their template anymore to report false news on success. They got what they wanted in ’06, they got the House. They got the Senate back. When it serves them in ’08, they’ll flip again, as they did by not reporting that all the Democrats voted for the war, despite the clips and despite all the lies and so forth. Something else, too. You look at this guy, Gordon Brown, the prime minister of Great Britain. He shows up here amid reports that he’s thinking of pulling Great Britain out of there. He shows up and endorses the effort, says it’s major, it’s crucial, it’s important, and praises the US for its leadership. Despite the sentiment in his country that literally got rid of Tony Blair, despite the sentiment that said, ‘You gotta get us out of there,’ they can see this too clearly now, the success that the surge is having.

Now, two more bites. This next one, this is even more amazing than what you just heard. This is David Ignatius. Now, you remember, to set this up, for four years, the Drive-Bys and the Democrats have been saying, ‘Iraq, it’s unnecessary. Bush lied. There were no weapons of mass destruction. This is an intel screw-up. They cooked the books. They cooked the intel. There was no reason to go there. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Al-Qaeda wasn’t there,’ blah, blah, blah, blah. In fact, ‘Gotta get bin Laden and Zawahiri, and until we do that, this is a failure, we have lost. Bush has misfocused.’ Matthews says to David Ignatius of the Washington Post, ‘What good does this Iraq war do to reduce the overall threat of terrorism?’

IGNATIUS: These struggles are different fronts of the same war. The notion that, you know, a defeat to the United States and its allies in Iraq is costless in terms of the larger war against Al-Qaeda is just wrong. I mean, you know, bin Laden said again and again, the Americans are weak, if you hit ’em hard, they’ll run away. They were hit hard in Beirut; they ran away. They were hit hard in Somalia; they ran away.

RUSH: I feel like Fred Sanford here, ‘It’s the big one, Elizabeth, it’s the big one, it could be the big one.’ You remember, Fred Sanford always thought he was having a heart attack. Redd Foxx, the lovable irascible Redd Foxx. Do you realize what you people just heard? You just had a Washington Post columnist say that the idea that Iraq is different from the war on terror is silly, that these struggles are different fronts in the same war. And finally, Michael Duffy of TIME, Chris Matthews says, ‘How will it be better if we stay in Iraq two years more than if we leave in a year?’

DUFFY: You get to protect two clear interests the US has: keeping Al-Qaeda from having a safe haven on the order of Afghanistan and keeping that regional war from breaking out.

RUSH: Okay. I had to do this segment again and glad you indulged me here, because I wanted to present some theories that might explain why the 180 here. It will be interesting to see what happens tomorrow. It will be interesting to see if the Drive-Bys are indeed able to influence the Reids and the Pelosis. Now, Russ Feingold said on Fox yesterday he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care what Petraeus says. He’s going to seek other sources, and he’s still holding firm on this. But this was before the column came out today in the New York Times.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: John in Santa Barbara, California, you are next on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. I think that the defining thing between the Republicans and Democrats is the war, but the Democrats knew all along that the war is necessary. They just wanted to make Bush make the mistake of pulling out, but now that we’re so close to the election, they want that issue to go away, you know, because they don’t want to have to be stuck with having to pull it out —

RUSH: This is not making it go away. This is making it look like what Bush is doing is working.

CALLER: Well, yeah.

RUSH: Has a chance to work. They can then start to ignore it after they have done this little 180 and pretend that it’s gone away, but Bush isn’t going to let it go away. If it turns out this thing is working, one of the things I said in the first, the biggest problem that we’ve had, I think for all these polls that have been taken that show the American people are unsettled, filled with angst, anxiety, apprehension, unhappiness, it’s all been said to be about the war. Well, except for the fact that it might be. If something like this could serve to unite the country behind the effort, because everybody loves a winner, and it was depressing for some people that we were reportedly losing and that we didn’t seem to have a way to turn that around. I can understand that depressing people. We are the United States of America. We do not lose, especially to a bunch of seventh century people. And yet we were. It was reported we were losing. It was a quagmire and it was Vietnam and all these things.

If it could be turned around and enough Americans who have been on sort of the wobbly side of this, could say, ‘You know what, we’re winning,’ okay, everybody loves a winner, we get behind this, can you imagine what the unity or the near unity — I’m not foolish enough to believe that every American on the left would come around on this, don’t misunderstand. But if the polls go up dramatically on this, and there’s this sense of unity out there, you realize what it would mean attitudinally, psychologically for the country? This is what the Democrats don’t want, folks. They want angst, anxiety, unsettledness, fear, chaos, crisis, and all that. The only person that might be able to benefit from this would indeed be Hillary. That’s why we’re targeting our theory to explain this turnaround in her direction.

Polly in Traverse City, Michigan, I’m glad you waited. Welcome to the EIB Network.

CALLER: Hi, Rush.

RUSH: Hi.

CALLER: Okay, I know what’s going on, why the 180.

RUSH: (Laughing.) All right, I’m listening.

CALLER: It’s a left-wing liberal conspiracy just to mess with your head.

RUSH: (Laughing.)

CALLER: It’s a big joke. They’re going to come say April Fool’s or something like that.

RUSH: This is trying to mess with me?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: Well, if that’s their theory, they’re doing a good job.

CALLER: I think so, too.

RUSH: I hate to be so childlike here in my incredulity over this, but I really hope I’m not making too big a deal of it, but given four years of the exact opposite reporting, and we know that the Drive-Bys are there in Iraq and they can see this, and we know that the Democrats are not going to pull out if they win the White House. They’re not going to pull out with victory saddled around their necks, so all of this has been pure politics. We all know that. Now the politics is changing. The politics is changing because the situation on the ground is changing. The Democrats — some of them, at least the Drive-Bys, ‘Okay, look, we can’t deny this anymore,’ is one thing, but they’re messing with my head in the sense that I can’t quite figure it out yet.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: I’m still working on it.

CALLER: It’s great to talk to you Rush. Thank you. You’ve made a big change in my life. You helped me change. (Laughing.)

RUSH: How so? You have thirty seconds.

CALLER: Young liberal.

RUSH: Oh, you were a liberal?

CALLER: Young. Young.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: But over the past ten years, I’ve grown up quite a bit, and —

RUSH: Was your dad a mean-spirited conservative taskmaster?

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: And I learned to be just like him, and I’m proud.

RUSH: Got any letters you wrote to some guy you want to tell us about?

CALLER: No.

RUSH: Good.

CALLER: Nothing you need to know about.

RUSH: (Laughing.) Good answer. All right, Polly, it’s great to hear from you.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Linda in New York City, hello, and welcome to EIB Network.

CALLER: Yeah, my comment was about the Drive-By Media’s 180 on Iraq.

RUSH: Yeah?

CALLER: I think the reason so that no matter what they do, the Democrats don’t have the votes to stop the surge or to break Bush’s will, so now they’re trying to put a good face on their impotence, or a little sugar on the sour grapes.

RUSH: Hmm. Well, we’ll have to say if the elected Democrats follow along. It’s one thing for the Drive-Bys to do it, and if the Drive-Bys are advising the Democrats here in a surreptitious way, then it’s up to the elected leaders. If Reid and Pelosi start changing their tune, then you might have a point.

CALLER: Well, even if some of them hold out and want to do it, if they can’t do it, doesn’t it sort of say, ‘Well, maybe it isn’t so bad not to do it?’ I don’t know. I’m just throwing that in.

RUSH: Well, here’s the thing. To really understand all of this, you have to put it in the proper context. You have to look at it through the proper prism. This is why you need me. You look at this through the one lens that they’re looking at it, and that’s the ’08 election. That’s all that matters to them: the ’08 presidential election. So it may well be, they’re seeing these poll numbers climb. They do not have a majority of the American people opposed to this. They do not have a majority of the American people who want to lose this, meaning Iraq. They don’t have it. If they did, they would have gotten all these resolutions passed. If the vast majority of the American people were the same mind-set they were in Vietnam they would have successfully de-funded the war and ended it that way. They had precedent for that. They don’t have that public opinion. They are trying to create it. They have been trying to create it for four years, and they have failed. That is momentous. Now with the polls that came out twice in two days in New York Times or twice in three days last week about how support for the initial invasion is high. They polled that twice, because they couldn’t believe their first results. So I think somebody is saying, ‘Wait a minute. We don’t have the American people on this.’ They’ve been lying about what the election results in ’06 were about. ‘That was a mandate to get out of Iraq.’ It wasn’t, and they’re faced now with reality looking through the lens of the ’08 presidential race at what I’ve been telling you: they’re setting themselves up for a grand, McGovernization-type landslide defeat, and I think somebody is smart in the Democrat Party is trying to reverse that direction.

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