RUSH: over the weekend the Democrat Congress totally caved and gave Bush spying authority. (Laughing.) They just did, and the reason is very simple. They know the threat we face, and when push comes to shove, when that FISA judge made his ruling that these two phone calls fell outside the limit, that’s when the Bush administration ran. Look, folks, the Democrats know what the threat is. They see the intel. They know what’s going on. That’s why, if they’re in the White House in ’08, whoever it is, Hillary, we’re not pulling out of Iraq. We are not, and they are lying to their own base, and they are lying to the American people about getting out of Iraq. I mean, they’d love to get out now. They’d love to engineer a loss, don’t misunderstand, that they could saddle around Bush and the Republicans and that could destroy them, but once defeat can be laid at their feet, it ain’t going to happen. When the push came to shove on this security proposal, all of this talk in the past two years about ‘domestic spying,’ and civil liberties, was bunch of BS, because when the pedal hit the metal, when the rubber hit the road, the realities of national security overcame it — and he kept ’em in Congress on Saturday.
He told us. Bush is showing how to be a great parent, how you deal with kids. You put ’em in a detention center. You deny ’em their vacation on the first day. You do whatever. You be tough. He got what he want — and the netroots, the kook fringe is beside themselves. They feel sold out! They’re angrier at the Democrats in Congress than they are at Bush, and that is saying something! You gotta hear this sound bite by a fellow fringe kook, who used to be a pretty responsible news guy in New York but has totally gone off the cliff for the Democrats. It’s amazing to watch what’s happened to Jack Cafferty. It is amazing to see. When I moved to New York he was on Live at Five was doing all this stuff, and he was great. He has just totally, like all these people on the left, lost it. He has no sense of reason, unless this is just a purposeful attempt to appeal to a certain segment of the kooks. Here’s a montage of his little segment. He does a thing with Wolf Blitzed — Blitzer! — on The Situation Room, where he puts a question out then and then reads e-mail from viewers who react to it. This is a montage of Jack Cafferty reading some of the e-mails he has gotten from the wacko-fringe base.
CAFFERTY: Lisa, Fairfax, Virginia: ‘I can’t believe this happened. This is not what the Democratic Congress was elected to do. I want them to restore our civil liberties, not help King Bush and his minions take them away.’ Mary writes, ‘The Dem leadership are just too cowardly and gutless to be trusted to defend our country. Claire writes, ‘The Democrats caved on the issue and allowed themselves to be, as you put it, ‘strong-armed.’ What’s left? Hopeless.’ Jonathan in Connecticut: ‘Of course the Democratic Congress shouldn’t have allowed the warrantless wiretapping bill to go through.’ Samantha in Arizona writes: ‘Congratulations to our Congress in backing a president who continues to violate our Constitution and prolong a lie-based war,’ and Tom in Delaware writes, ‘The Democrats have joined the Republicans in scuttling the Constitution. I am less afraid of a terrorist attack than I am of my own government.’
RUSH: All right. (Laughing.) So they are livid, and they are livid at the Democrats. But the bottom line here is, aside from the substance of the issue, every time, every time these Democrats go up against George W. Bush, they lose — and they lose embarrassingly. They lost on all of their resolutions. They lost so bad Dingy Harry had to pull them all. Now they’re left with trying to discredit General Petraeus. There’s a thing they’re trying to blame on him. What is it? Oh, ‘all these missing weapons.’ They’re trying to blame Petraeus as incompetent in advance of his report, which is coming out in September. For this guy, Bush, to be such an idiot and such a brain dead Alfred E. Newman and frat boy and all this, why, he just skunks them at each and every turn.