RUSH: Who’s next? David in Melbourne, Florida, glad you called. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Yes. It’s a pleasure to speak with you finally, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you, sir. Thanks very much.
CALLER: As I told the call screener, I believe that with the way this war and all our wars seem to be handled, we’ve got a lot of Special Forces — you know, Navy SEALs, Army Special Forces, Rangers. We’ve got the Marines. They train all the time for this. Right now they’re probably sitting at their bases going, “Come on, let us go. Let us go. Let us do our job. Let us do what we trained for.”
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: Now, the lady that called, she said, “Oh, what happens if you have a son in the Army?” If my son was a Marine or a Ranger or something like that, and he loses his life fighting for our country — and in this case we’ve got bullies over there that are decapitating American citizens, French citizens, English citizens, and really taunting us — it’s a bully, and now it’s time to go to the schoolyard and punch his lights out. They’re trained for it. Firefighters are trained to put out fires. We don’t want to see ’em get burned up or fall through a floor or something like that, but it’s gonna happen.
RUSH: Well, you know, David, there’s a —
CALLER: It’s a (unintelligible) but it’s gonna happen.
RUSH: There’s a body of thought in this country. That woman who called, I know who you’re referring to, and I don’t know how typical she is. But one of the things, I think, that people like her believe — and this is not a criticism. It’s an observation. One of the things that everybody uses… I’m having a mental block. Transference, in a way. She’s thinking that if she were in the military, the last thing that she’d want to be doing is this kind of war. “Hell, we were just there!”
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: So she assumes that military people don’t want to be assigned that. They don’t want to do this! Yet they sign up. What you’re saying is, yes, we do want to do it.
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: “This is something that has to be taken care of and this is what we signed up and trained for. So turn us loose and let us do it. Don’t pussy-foot around it from 35,000 feet. Let us go take care of it!” Right?
CALLER: Yes, and I think if we follow wars like that, it’s kind of like the offensive line. You know, that first quarter, the first few series of plays, you soften ’em up. You take control of the defensive line or vice-versa — and whichever team takes control, the other team’s got a long game.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: And it’s kind of the same thing.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: We’ve gotta go in there and do war right, and it would be quick. It’d be like pulling a Band-Aid off a wound (chuckles) instead of prolonging it like we seem to do.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: That’s when the politicians get involved.
RUSH: Well, exactly. “Projection” was the term I was looking for, and what most people that are not in the military think is: “My God, I wouldn’t want to go. I wouldn’t want to go (mumbling),” assuming that everybody in the military doesn’t want to go. But they do. They signed up. They volunteered knowing full well, particularly at this point in time, that the likelihood when you volunteer is that you’re gonna see combat, or you’re gonna be very close to it with the War on Terror and everything.
So I think it’s a fascinating case study, ’cause people think… Like in this woman’s case, she probably thinks this is stupid. We should have never left Iraq in the first place. We should have taken care of it. Now we got people that don’t know what they’re doing, and they’re putting people in harm’s way, and, “My God, who wants to go into this kind of situation where we’ve got incompetence top to bottom ruling the show?” That’s not how you guys look at it, I know, and I’m glad you called to make the point.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Sam in, North Carolina. I’ve got a quick minute here but I wanted to get to you before we’re out for the day. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, it’s a pleasure talking to you. Thanks for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet, sir.
CALLER: Hey, so, kind of along the lines of the fellow caller and talking in regards the female caller who was on earlier. I’m an active duty Army officer. I’ve been on duty 7-1/2 going on going on eight years. I’ve been to Iraq, been to Afghanistan, been to Kosovo. I’m getting ready to go back to Balkans here shortly. I just think it is very interesting when I listen to people in the American public when they say, “Hey, we’re tired of sacrificing.”
You know, the majority — like 90% — of Americans haven’t really sacrificed over the past 13 years. So when it comes to the current situation in Iraq, we members of the military and some other well-learned, well-educated people in American public kind of understand. We understand the threat; we know what we’re facing.
RUSH: Well, that’s why I think — and I’m not pandering here, Sam. That is why I have the most profound appreciation for people like you, because you’re right. You volunteer to do something that 99.9% of the population would never volunteer to do. It’s not that they haven’t sacrificed; it’s that it’s not in their makeup. You are special for doing it. As a result, it is hard to understand that you guys sign up to do this, and when the opportunity comes, you want to do it. That’s why I think you deserve all the respect and support that you’ve earned.