RUSH: This is Elizabeth in Allen Park, Michigan, I’m glad you waited. You’ve been on hold a long time. Thank you for waiting.
CALLER: Oh, Rush congratulations for your 20th anniversary.
RUSH: Thank you very much.
CALLER: The reason why I’m calling, I happened to watch The View after taking my dog for a walk and Nancy Pelosi was on, and Elisabeth asked her why can’t Barack Obama admit that the surge is working? And she goes, ‘The surge isn’t working because Iraqis aren’t taking control of their country,’ or something like that.
RUSH: Wait a second. Was that today?
CALLER: Yeah, it was today.
RUSH: Nancy Pelosi said the surge isn’t working?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Well, grab audio sound bite number eight. Let me know when sound bite number eight is ready to go, because this is from Meet the Press yesterday. Tom Brokaw said to Obama, ‘This is what USA Today had to say about your position on the surge. ‘Why can’t Obama bring himself to acknowledge the surge worked better than he and other skeptics thought that it would? That’s a conditioned response on their part. What is the stubbornness say about the kind of president he would be?”
OBAMA: There’s no doubt that the violence has gone down more than any of us anticipated, including President Bush and John McCain. If you — if you — if you had talked to them, uh, and — and said, you know, what, we’re going to bring down violence to levels that we have, I think — I suspect USA Today’s own editorial board wouldn’t have anticipated that.
RUSH: Now, Elizabeth, did you hear that?
CALLER: Yes, I did. I heard Nancy Pelosi directly say that the surge isn’t working because Iraqis aren’t taking full control of their country. But then she goes on to say that Iraqis wants us to leave Iraq, and President Bush is going to sit down and talk about pulling out. And then Joy Behar, the super liberal —
RUSH: Yeah, but wait a minute. I don’t care — I mean I care, but I really don’t care about what Pelosi said. What I care is the 100% contradiction here. Pelosi today on The View says the surge isn’t working because the politicians of Iraq have not taken control of their country. Obama says it’s worked better than even Bush or Cheney thought, or McCain thought.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Now, that’s the first time he said this. I’m telling you he is running a dual or maybe a triple campaign. He is saying one thing to one group of people, another thing to another group of people, and he’s trying to have it both ways. That’s why he’s stuttering around. Pelosi is just an idiot. Well, that’s not true. She knows that the audience of The View is idiots — you excluded, Elizabeth, of course. It doesn’t take much to figure out that people that watch that show are a cup and saucer short of a full place setting. So she knows who the audience is. Snerdley has a question. The official program observer. Yes, what’s the question? Hm-hm. Hm-hm. Hm-hm. Why plan a mission that you think is not going to work? Well, who, what are you talking about — Oh. (laughing) Snerdley wants to know why plan something that isn’t going to work. Obama said it wasn’t gonna work, had no chance of working. Then he said it’s done really okay, but it’s because the politicians came together. He said the reason the surge worked is because the great Sunni awakening and the Sadr army and the Shi’a all came together over there, this is while he was there saying this. They’re all over the place, and Pelosi, a day after he says this, goes out and says, it didn’t work because the politicians have not gotten their act together.
Now, again, in Pelosi’s case, because she’s not the candidate here, in Pelosi’s case, she knows the audience. It’s an ultra-left-wing audience. They don’t want to hear about success. They don’t want to hear about how things work. They want to hear nothing but failure. She knows that most of the hostettes on that show want to hear nothing but failure. Now here is Obama saying on Meet the Press yesterday, no doubt the violence has gone down more than any of us anticipated, including Bush and McCain. And if you want to talk to them and say, you know what, we’re going to bring down violence and levels we have, nobody would have — that was the objective. Why do you think it was planned, Senator? What was the point of the surge? This is where his inexperience and his real lack of intelligence and judgment display themselves. Why plan the thing? They’ve got some polling data that says he’s on the wrong side of the surge business, the American people love hearing about successful military operations. The American people don’t want to lose military operations, they don’t want to lose wars. And Obama, he’s gotta get himself on the right, ‘Oh, yeah, worked better than anybody ever thought,’ why plan it? You think they planned a 50% success surge? Why even plan the operation if you don’t plan for it to succeed as wildly and as thoroughly as possible?
At any rate, Ray in Putnam, Connecticut, you’re next on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, listen, George Brett is not only a great ballplayer; he’s also a great judge of character.
RUSH: He’s a great guy. George Brett makes fun of himself, you know, for being all that not informed. He’s far more informed, intelligent, and so forth than he likes to portray himself to be.
CALLER: Yeah, and he’s got you pegged right. Listen, this Obama guy is a danger to this country. I can’t understand how anybody could even think of voting for this guy. He has zero experience. I spent 32 years in the military serving this country, and I don’t want to hand it over —
RUSH: They’re not thinking about it. This is something that’s hard for people to understand. They’re not thinking about it. It’s an emotional thing. It’s party loyalty; it’s ideological loyalty; it is devotion to a personality and a cult. Most people are not thinking about Obama. They just think they want change, the Bush administration has been bad, they’ve been led to believe the country is going to hell in a hand basket, he’s going to fix it, he’s going to make the rest of the world like us, that’s going to make us safer. There isn’t a whole lot of thought going into Obama’s support and his campaign illustrates it. He’s all over the ballpark. He’s saying five different things about every subject.
CALLER: Right, listen, I’d love to debate the guy.
RUSH: He won’t debate.
CALLER: Huh?
RUSH: He will not debate you.
CALLER: No, well, he can’t debate anybody as far as I’m concerned. I think it’s going to be interesting when he does get down to debates before the election because I think McCain, if he plays his cards right, can tear this guy apart. Has he ever even registered for the draft, does anyone know?
RUSH: Who, Obama?
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: I don’t think so. I don’t know.
CALLER: He’s required to.
RUSH: But that isn’t going to get you anywhere. Pointing that out, all that’s going to do is steel the support for him among — you’re not going to talk anybody out of supporting Obama whether he’s registered for the draft or not.
CALLER: Well, it goes to a little bit of patriotic duty, doesn’t it?
RUSH: Well, we got a different definition of patriotism on that side, and it certainly has nothing to do with the military. Their definition of patriotism is not wearing a flag pin.
CALLER: Yeah, right.
RUSH: Their definition of patriotism is taking the flag logo off of your newly painted campaign plane.
CALLER: There you go. I’ll tell you another thing. We need leadership in this country right now. We’re in dire straits. Congress shouldn’t be going out for six weeks recess. They should be staying there. Somebody ought to be telling them they should stay there.
RUSH: No, no, no. No, no, no, no. The way they’re currently constituted, get them out of there.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let’s go back to sound bite eight. Now, here’s Pelosi on The View today.
PELOSI: The surge’s purpose was to have a military time frame where there would be military, uh, security to enable the government of Iraq to make the political changes necessary for reconciliation. I said it before when I was here, and I’ll say it again. Even with all the time that has elapsed, they still have not done that. The purpose of the surge was to pass the laws to bring reconciliation, so we could bring our troops home safely soon, honorably and responsibly; and that has not happened. Now the government of Iraq is saying, ‘We want you to go home,’ so maybe the time has come for us to sit down with them and figure that out.
RUSH: All right. Now, I know that the reaction that many of you are having is, ‘What a lying woman. She’s just lying through her teeth or maybe how stupid is she.’ Again, she’s not stupid. She knows who the audience is. She knows who watches The View. She’s spoon-feeding them what they want to hear. None of what she said is accurate. The surge was not done to bring the troops home soon. The surge was done to help achieve victory to quell a bunch of violence, insurgent violence and defeat terrorists who are keeping that country just torn apart. It has succeeded overwhelmingly! Even Obama, who said this yesterday on Meet the Press, agrees.
OBAMA: There’s no doubt that the violence, uh, has gone down more than any of us anticipated, including President Bush and John McCain! Uh, if — if you had — (nervous laugh) If you talk to them, uh, and — and ‘You know what? We’re going to bring down violence,’ to levels that we have, I think — I — I suspect USA Today’s own (nervous laugh) editorial board wouldn’t have anticipated that.
RUSH: The ego of this guy knows no bounds. Well, you talk to anybody, why, it’s worked better than anybody thought. Aside from having not heard that before from anybody, but especially from Obama, the idea that the surge worked better than anybody thought is akin to saying, ‘You know, those bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, man, they worked better than we thought.’ Why drop the bomb, why do the surge if you didn’t intend it to work well? But aside from that, here you got Pelosi saying in one story that it didn’t work, didn’t accomplish anything, you’ve got the Democrat presidential nominee, presumptive, Obama saying, it ‘exceeded everybody’s exceptions.’ I know what Pelosi is doing, and she’s just pandering to an audience that watches that stupid TV show. But this thing with Obama is what’s fascinating to me because with every story he tells about the surge, he has a different view.
Last week, the surge didn’t really make any difference. It was the political coalitions that did come together that Pelosi just this morning denied have come together and have worked! This party cannot even get on the same page about all this. This is a party that has invested in defeat, and Pelosi still is. Obama is obviously privy to this. He’s running a different campaign here than she is, and he’s obviously seen some focus group data that indicate that he’d better get on board this thing because the American people like victory, and to try to talk it down and to suggest it isn’t one is not going to help. The thing is, I know what a lot of you are saying, ‘But, Rush! But, Rush! Fraud! He’s just a plain old fraud. I mean, this is worse than Clinton.’ I agree with you. I was watching a little television here at the top-of-the-hour break, and on CNBC, the Street Sweetie was promo-ing some things coming up in her program, and one of them was Obamanomics.
I said, ‘What the hell is Obamanomics?’ And then I remembered, today Obama has a meeting with close economic advisors, and it’s the retreads from the Clinton years. There’s been no change, and there certainly isn’t anything new. Obamanomics? Boy, he dropped that Middle East trip real fast, didn’t he? Now he’s gotta get on the domestic side. And he’s got this is a group of ten or 12 people. Robert B. Reich-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h and Larry Summers and Warren Buffett. Who else is in this? Robert Rubin. Yeah, how’s CitiBank doing there, Robert? The stock price of CitiBank, Robert, what’s, it around 15 bucks? And this is Clinton’s treasury secretary savior. What change? See that’s the point. Folks, you can go out there and you can say he’s a fraud all day long, I’m telling you it isn’t gonna work. We tried that with Clinton, we tried pointing out how you never get the truth out of him. You don’t get the truth out of Obama. You get different stories for different audiences.
He’s running multiple campaigns, at least two, and that’s why he’s unsure of himself when he’s speaking off the teleprompter. But the focus has to be on his lack of experience, not that he’s a fraud, because the people that are going to vote for him don’t care. This is going to be a referendum on Obama. It really is. So people are going to have to vote against him. Well, I know that’s not a perfect world. You want to have somebody out there you could vote for. But this campaign, this election is going to be a referendum, up or down, on Obama. And people are going to have to be convinced that there is a great risk in electing this guy, and just running around and telling him he’s a fraud, that’s just going to be interpreted as politics as usual. ‘Well, look, that’s the same thing you guys said about Clinton. We like Clinton. It’s the same thing you guys said about him.’ Yeah, even though it’s true, even though the guy lies through his teeth, even though the guy is just all over the ballpark and says things strategically and tactically without any foundation.’
See, we know what the foundation is. The foundation is pure, ultra-leftist and liberalism. That’s what they’re trying to mask with all of these things. Anyway, I’m not through working out the strategic plan here to deal with this, but I think it’s obvious that running the same kind of critical campaign of Obama that people tried of Bill Clinton is not gonna work. We’ve seen this, and the people that end up supporting people like that don’t care about all that. They care about how these candidates make them feel. So the campaign has to make them feel scared of Obama being in power. Whatever takes place has to make them frightened of what this guy is — and not because he lies, and not because he’s a fraud, ’cause most people think all politicians lie, and most people think that all politicians are frauds. So for one party to say that about another and vice-versa is not going to change anybody’s vote.