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July 14, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:04
July 14, 2005, Thursday, Hour #3
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With half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it fair, ladies and gentlemen, Rush Limbaugh once again having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
Here on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, I am America's anchorman, play-by-playman of the news.
Happy to have you along.
We are on the ditto cam at rushlimbaugh.com if you want to watch radio genius, as it happens.
Telephone number is 800-282-2882 and the email address rush at EIBNet.com.
We are less than an hour away from a joint press conference, an announcement between the storied Joseph Wilson IV and Chuck Schumer, where they will jointly call for the president to revoke Karl Rove's security clearance since he outed the name of Wilson's poor, pitiful wife and had her career destroyed.
Blah, blah, And if you're just joining us, this little press conference that Schumer and Wilson are hosting today, this little joint double team, has been a matter of some speculation on my part because I don't think these guys are strangers.
I think they go way, way back.
I think Wilson's a Democrat hack, and I think Wilson is working with the Democrats since this whole episode began to undermine the war in Iraq and the Bush presidency.
I want to share with you, because we've had the first hour of this program, we were inundated with what normally I would call seminar callers.
But these were not seminar callers.
A seminar caller is a liberal trying to act like a big fan of this program, usually a liberal who just was afraid he won't get on the air because he's living in the illusion that we don't take calls from people that disagree with us.
And we can spot these seminar callers a mile away.
They have little manuals that they've been passed, that have been passed out to them over the years by Democrat operatives advising them how to get on this program.
However, so emboldened are they by what they think is the strength of their position, they think they finally got Bush on the ropes.
Rove's out.
Bush is next.
They didn't even bother hiding the fact that they were libs today, so we can't really say they were seminar callers.
They just, they called in and they were haughty.
And a couple of them were rather arrogant and condescending while spewing their ignorance.
And yet we dealt with them.
And so in this interest, in this vein, liberals, I could tell them that the sun comes up in the east and sets in the west and then on a clear day the sky is blue.
And they would accuse me of lying.
So I'm going to go beyond what I think in this segment, ladies and gentlemen.
And I'm going to share with you, because I know the liberals are listening, because this program is their number one objective to get after they get Rove and Bush.
I want to share with you, liberals in the audience, and all of you, two pieces from about a year ago.
One is from William Sapphire in the New York Times, July 19th of 2004.
The other, a Washington Post story by Susan Schmidt, July 10th, 2004.
Here's the Sapphire piece.
He opens by quoting Bush from the State of the Union address January 28th, 2003.
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
Those were the 16 words in a momentous message to a joint session of Congress that were pounced on by the wrong war left to become the central centerpiece of its angry accusation that Bush lied to us, or as John Kerry more delicately puts it, misled us into thinking that Saddam's Iraq posed a danger to the U.S.
Then he lied to us.
The he lied to us charge was led by Joseph Wilson, the former diplomat sent in early 2002 by the CIA to Niger to check out reports by several European intelligence services that Iraq had secretly tried to buy that African nation's only major export, Yellow Cake Uranium Ore.
Wilson testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that he had reassured or assured U.S. officials back in 2002 that there was nothing to that story.
When columnist Robert Novak raised the question of nepotism by reporting that he got that assignment at the urging of his CIA wife, Wilson denied that heatedly and denounced her outing, triggering an investigation.
The skilled self-promoter Wilson was then embraced as an anti-war martyr, sold a book with truth in its title, appeared on the cover of Time and every TV talk show denouncing Bush.
Two exhaustive government reports came out last week showing that it is the president's lionized accuser and not Mr. Bush who has been having trouble with the truth.
Contrary to his indignant claim that Valerie had nothing to do with the matter of selecting him for the African trip, the Senate published testimony that his CIA wife had offered up his name and printed her memo to her boss, that my husband has good relations with Niger officials and lots of French contacts.
Further destroying his credibility, Wilson now insists this strong pitch did not constitute a recommendation.
More important, it now turns out that senators believe his report to the CIA after visiting Niger actually bolstered the case that Saddam sought, and Bush's truthful verb was sought, yellowcake, the stuff of nuclear bombs.
The CIA gave Wilson's report a good grade because the Nigerian officials admitted that the Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999 and that the Nigerian prime minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium, confirming what the British and the Italian intelligence agencies had told us from their own sources.
But a CIA analyst opined the Brits have exaggerated this issue because the Iraqis already have 550 metric tons of uranium oxide in their inventory.
State Department intelligence also was dubious, reports the Senate, more so in October when an Italian journalist brought in a bunch of phony documents somebody was trying to sell him about a Niger uranium transaction.
This outweighed the report of a top security official in the French foreign ministry who told U.S. diplomats in November of 2002 that France believed the reporting was true that Iraq had made a procurement attempt for uranium from Niger.
Two months later, with no objection from the CIA, the famous 16 words went into Bush's 2003 State of the Union.
But when word leaked about the fake documents, Wilson launched his publicity campaign, acting as if he had known earlier about the forgeries.
The Senate reports that in his misleading, anonymous leak to the Washington Post, he said he may have misspoken.
He said he may have become confused about his own recollection.
The subsequent firestorm caused the White House to retreat prematurely with the 16 words did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union address.
That apology was a mistake, and Sapphire is dead on right about this.
As I said yesterday, I still don't understand why the White House took those words out.
Bush had spoken the plain truth.
Did Saddam seek uranium from Africa?
Evidence of his continuing illegal interest in a nuclear program?
Well, here is Lord Butler's nonpartisan panel, which closely examined the basis of the British intelligence.
Quote, we conclude that the statement in President Bush's State of the Union address of 28 January 2003 that the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa was well-founded.
Let's go to the Washington Post story.
Susan Schmidt.
In July 10th, 2004, headline claims input cited on Niger mission.
Let us go now to the two key paragraphs.
The report, we're talking here about the Senate report, also said Wilson provided misleading information to the Washington Post last June.
He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.
Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the dates were wrong and the names were wrong when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports, the Senate panel said.
Wilson told the panel he may have been confused and may have misspoken to reporters.
The documents, purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq, were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger.
So let there be no doubt the man is a liar.
The man lied as an anonymous source to the Washington Post and the Washington Post was forced to out him as their source because of this Senate intelligence report.
The Sapphire column makes clear as well that Joseph Wilson lied through his teeth, made things up about how he got sent to Niger, that his wife did recommend him.
He said, no, that wasn't a recommendation.
He then later said it was somebody from the vice president's office that asked the CIA to send him over there.
None of this is true.
So if you don't want to believe it when I say it, here it is from the horses' mouths, the Senate Intelligence Committee report via the Washington Post and William Sapphire.
Quick timeout.
We will be back and continue in mere moments as the heat gets turned up by the EIB network.
You might even want to look at it this way, folks.
You could even say that Joe Wilson was an utter failure in his mission to Niger.
To this day, the Brits stand by their report that the Iraqi Saddam sought yellow cake uranium from Niger.
Joe Wilson went over there and said he didn't find any evidence of it at all.
And he is lionized as a hero by the American left.
And yet he botched the mission.
And we don't know what credentials he had as an investigator to go over there and find this kind of evidence.
But what we do know is that he went over there and said he didn't find any.
If he did see some, he lied about it.
If he didn't find any, he's a lousy investigator.
He's a perfect match for today's Democrats, a perfect match for today's liberals, a lying hypocrite and an incompetent to boot.
And I'll tell you what, I'm just going to call a spade a spade.
You know, this guy's a former State Department ambassador or whatever, and his wife's in the CIA.
Well, CIA agents have handlers, and that's what Schumer is.
Chuck Schumer is Joe Wilson's handler, folks.
If you want to understand their, I will bet you a dollar to a donut that that's the relationship, that Schumer is Joe Wilson's handler in this whole enterprise of deceit and lies.
I'll bet that explains the whole thing.
And that's exactly what this is.
It's just nothing more than an attempt to get Bush and Roe.
That's why the American left is so excited about it.
That's why facts don't matter to them.
And it is the perfect explanation for why this association.
Chuck Schumer, of all people, Chuck Schumer, he's obviously Joe Wilson's handler in all this.
He's the guy guiding Wilson through the jungle, if you will, in how to bring about what it is the Democrats want because they've attempted to establish that Wilson's a nonpartisan, he's just a decent guy.
Hey, he was serving his country.
Hey, he went over there, found this stuff, and look at the president lied about what he found.
And so he's come forward as a concerned citizen, folks, to explain how he has been misrepresented.
And he's served his country well and blah, blah, blah, blah.
He's not going to stand for this when, in fact.
The whole thing's a set up from the get-go.
He's an agent.
He's undercover.
And he's being handled by Chuck Schumer.
Here's Cliff in Washington, Missouri.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Hello.
Hey, Rush, how are you doing?
Yeah, couldn't be better, sir.
Thank you.
Hey, you're kind of beating up on this Joe Wilson guy.
And I remember another guy you kind of beat up on.
His name was Hans Blick.
You call him Inspector Clusot?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you used names like Nitwit, Buffoon, a blundering idiot.
And that didn't turn out to be true, did it?
You know, I'm really confused, Cliff.
You know, I love talking to you people.
I really do, but it's not going to prove useful if you're not going to listen to what just happened on the radio program.
Yeah, I called him Inspector Cluseau.
I'll stand by it to this day.
Hans Blicks is also an anti-American U.N. elitist who was doing his best to undermine the U.S. effort in the war on terror and in Iraq.
These inspectors were kicked out of that country long enough for all sorts of stuff to be hidden and moved.
And we keep getting little stories here and there of evidence of materials to build bombs and this sort of stuff.
And as far as Joe Wilson, I just got through explaining.
I'm telling you what the Senate Intelligence Committee report said.
I'm telling you what the 9-11 Commission report said.
I'm telling you what William Sapphire said precisely because I know you're not going to believe me.
You can sit here and say, why don't you stop bashing Blicks and stop bashing Wilson?
Why don't you guys stop bashing Bush?
Why don't you get on to try and explain to us what you people want to do for the country?
Why don't you try to give us just five minutes, five minutes of a policy?
How are you going to improve on the economy?
How are you going to win the war on terror?
How are you going to protect the country?
Why don't you got, if you can do it in five minutes, you might only need one.
You might only need 30 seconds.
You might even not need that long because you don't have any ideas.
And that's why you have to call here and get on me for bashing whoever.
We are engaged in the arena of ideas.
We've got all kinds of ideas.
Our ideas are being implemented and they are working and they are rebounding the economy.
They are protecting the country in the war on terror.
And all you guys are is a bunch of nattering nabobs of doom and gloom and pessimism and defeat.
And all you can do is call here and get on me for bashing people.
I'm not bashing.
I'm telling you the truth about people.
It's up to you to have courage to believe it or to continue to live in the fog that you're living in with a bag over your head or whatever you're doing.
Here's Scott in Tyson's Corner, Virginia.
Nice to have you on the program, sir.
Hello.
Hey, Rush, I'd like to be the first person to call for Valerie Clayman's resignation from the CIA.
I don't know what this incompetent CIA analyst is doing by sending her husband off on a mission to go look for WMDs.
But I mean, I seem to remember the Democrats complaining incessantly that we haven't found the WMDs, and yet we have a CIA analyst sending her ambassador husband to look for them.
Well, he wasn't actually looking for weapons of mass destruction.
He was going over there trying to confirm something that the Brits had told us.
And the Brits to this day stand by.
Well, yeah, the material for it.
Yeah, if you don't need the nuclear material, the yellow cake uranium.
But the, you know, as I said, he's incompetent or else he's a liar.
It could be both.
He could be both.
His problem is that he's being handled by Chuck Schumer.
And of course, Schumer's orchestrating his words and his moves and so forth.
But Schumer knows they've got a sympathetic press in Washington.
They're not going to look at Wilson the way we are looking at him here because Wilson's got the goods.
Whether they're true or not, Wilson's got the goods that allows the PAC mentality to form and execute.
So, you know, you can go after her.
She may be incompetent.
I don't know.
I don't know anything about Valerie Plame's career other than what I've read in a couple of news stories.
But from what I've been able to gather about Wilson, this is not somebody you would want to trust.
David in Tampa.
Hello, sir.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Hi.
Hey, Rush, how you doing?
Never better, sir.
Thanks for the call.
First time caller.
Thank you for taking my call.
I wanted to follow up on a conversation you were having last week with a gentleman who was questioning the victory over the war and terrorism going down the road from today.
Your comment was about education for a lot of these third world countries.
Do you think we are forward-leaning enough with all of the political bickering in this country going on these days to absolutely stand up and put a finish to some of these cells and situations you got like in London last week with homegrown tourists, educated, Muslim, extremist people in their country?
Do we have the people in our organization that are going to stand up and basically realize we are at war with these people?
And unless you totally defeat them or make some type of arrangement with them, I don't want to say peace, but make something, this is going to go on for generations to go.
I do agree with you on the education issue.
The arrangement we got to make with them is to kill them.
Absolutely.
I mean, there's no, I dealt with that last week.
You don't make arrangements.
You don't appease these people.
The answer to your question is, I'm scared that we don't right now.
Because we have a political party that is still in shock over the fact that it's lost power 11 years ago and been unable to get it back.
And I think that they are so blinded by partisanship, anger, and hatred, all those things, that they are willing to engage in policies that are designed to make the American people think no such threat really exists, other than when they can accuse Bush of not preparing us for it.
But in terms of joining the effort to do something about it, I don't have confidence that the Democratic Party is competent to lead this country in any war or as guarantors of our national security.
I certainly know John Kerry's not simply by virtue of his own words.
Who does he want to be our number one ally?
The French.
Second ally, the Germans.
I haven't heard anything from these people.
All I hear is constant berating of their own countrymen, interrogators at Abu Ghrab and Gitmo.
I don't hear praise for the U.S. military unless it's plastic and phony with fake tears on the floor of the Senate after they've already attempted to demoralize them and to impugn their honor and competence.
So at this point, I can't say that we are the United States when it comes to the war on terror.
I don't think anybody would say that we are and seriously mean it.
And it's a frightening thing.
And we'll be back and continue in a moment.
And we're back.
And folks, it's important to remember what is asserted in this William Sapphire piece.
And I want to synthesize this for you.
The fact of the matter is that, as Sapphire points out, Joseph Wilson first said when he got back from Niger, he first said that there was an Iraqi delegation in Niger looking for yellow cake.
And the CIA told him that was good at bolstering their report.
Then he lied and changed his report when the CIA told him to, claiming there was no delegation.
That's the essential element of the Sapphire peace.
And it goes again, once again, to the inability of Wilson to tell the truth and to show he's being handled by people here.
He first said that there was an Iraqi delegation in Niger looking for yellow cake, then he lied and changed his report when the CIA told him to, and he explained this to the Senate Intelligence Committee by saying, well, maybe I forgot the dates and the names.
Or maybe I forgot this or forgot that.
So the guy that ought to be in deep hot water here is indeed Wilson.
And I don't know that that'll ever be the case.
But in the court of public opinion, it ought to be.
Other items in the stack of stuff.
Former President Clinton, defending his senator wife's statements on abortion, said yesterday that Democrats are held to a double standard.
Even the leader of the Democratic Party is forced to whine all the time.
His comment came during remarks to a left-leaning student group called Campus Progress.
He said that young people in his party should speak directly to conservative voters.
He said that the Republicans have defined the abortion debate in a way that boxes in Democrats.
Here's what he said.
He said, for example, I mean, if you're a Democrat and you have sort of normal impulses, you're a sellout.
Like when Hillary said that abortion is a tragedy for virtually everybody who undergoes it.
We ought to do all we can to reduce abortion.
All of a sudden, all of a sudden, he said the media began asking, is she selling out?
Is she abandoning her principles?
What's she saying?
But I mean, if McCain, who's pro-life, if he works with Hillary on global warming, why he's a man of principle and he's moving to the middle, it's nuts.
So basically what you have here is Bill Clinton wondering why his wife is accused of being a sellout by the left, because Clinton cites the media here.
The media accuses her of being a sellout when she talks about abortion as a tragedy for virtually everybody who undergoes it.
We ought to do all we can to reduce it.
He wonders why that's a sellout, because Mr. President, I'll tell you, your party's abortion belief is, or the activists in your party's abortion belief is that every abortion possible should happen.
And they get mad when there's a possibility of an abortion, but the person's talked into an adoption or something.
I've seen it happen.
And that's why, so there are a number of reasons to explain the Democrats have boxed themselves in.
It's not that there's an unfair double standard being held here against them.
It is big news when a Democrat says that abortion should be rare.
That's not, I mean, what do you think this whole Supreme Court fight is about, Mr. President?
Plain and simple.
And in other election news, and this is from The Hill, the Capitol Hill newspaper, Michigan Republicans have said that they want to bar Democrats and independents from their Republican 2008 presidential primary if they succeed.
That would present a major hurdle for Senator McCain should he decide to run for the White House in 2008.
If you remember, in 2000, McCain's campaign against George W. Bush gained momentum after he won the Michigan primary by appealing to voters outside the GOP.
Went in there and said, I want Democrats to vote for me.
I want centrists to vote for me.
He was excited about that.
And I told you it's his plan for 2008 if he runs because he's already blown off the Republican base.
He did that in South Carolina in 2000.
And he fully intends to go out and get this nomination if he does it, if he tries, as this great uniter in the center.
But for that to happen, he's going to have to win primaries.
And the Michigan Republican Party says, well, you're not going to do it here by getting Democrats to vote for you because we're going to try to get our primary limited to only Republican voters, like most of them are.
Hubba, hubba, hubba.
We'll keep an eye on that.
President Bush skipping this week's annual NAA LCP convention for the fifth straight year.
But that's not preventing the White House and the Republican Party from waging a drive to woo African American voters.
Ken Melman of the RNC is going to the NAALCP convention.
And he's basically going to tell them how the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln lost its way with African American voters over the years and how determined the party is to get them back.
He said, we can't call ourselves a true majority unless we reach out to African Americans and make it the party of Lincoln.
There was a time when African American support turned Democrat and we didn't do enough to retain it.
Now we want to build on the gains we made in the last election.
You know what he's going to do?
He's going to go down there and basically apologize for what has come to be known as the Southern strategy popularized in the Nixon administration.
He's going to go down there and apologize for it.
In the midst of all of this, in the midst of all that's going on, once again, Republicans are going to go bend over and grab the ankles.
They're going to the NAALCP.
This is like going into Hyannisport and apologizing to Ted Kennedy for whatever and expecting him to become a supporter.
It's like showing up at the Chuck Schumer Joe Wilson press conference in 20 minutes and saying, okay, Ambassador Wilson, we apologize.
We hope you'll support us.
We can't become a majority party until people like you are voting for us.
It is just, it's absolutely absurd.
You know, I understand the emotion behind this.
I don't understand the political thinking.
I don't mind him going to the convention.
Don't misunderstand.
Go ahead and reach out.
Oh, I'm totally in support of that, but go back apologizing for the Southern strategy.
All that's going to do is let the Julian Bonds of the world stand up and say, CCC, they admit they're racists.
Not they admitted they were.
They admit they're racist and they know they're guilty and they're trying to come woo us.
Well, it's not going to work.
And they're just going to keep up the same old charge.
That's like I said yesterday.
Sometimes this White House is friendlier with its enemies than it is its supporters.
And it's a big puzzlement to me.
Nearly 40 years after the Watts riots devastated south central Los Angeles, a new study finds that the city's blacks still lag whites in education, housing, health care, and income.
The study released Wednesday by the L.A. Urban League and the United Way found that L.A.'s blacks are 10 times more likely than whites to be murdered, 35% less likely to graduate from Haskruel in four years, and they have a household income that trails that of white families by some 40%.
The report also found, however, that blacks are registered to vote in greater numbers than other racial groups.
They make up 14% of elected officials and are well represented in unions.
94% of black children have health insurance.
63% of black three- and four-year-olds attend preschool.
Mayor Antonio Villaragosa said the racial inequalities revealed in the report should put a chill in our spine.
He called the findings a call to action.
Said new housing, jobs, and education initiatives should be targeted first at poor South Central LA neighborhood.
Well, we've been doing that, Mayor, 40 years.
That's what this report says.
40 years after the Watts riot.
This means 40 years after the war on poverty.
40 years after taking steps to see to it that that never happens again.
I don't understand this.
We hear we have 40 years of failure as documented in this report.
And guess what?
We have high voter registration by these people who are mired in all this misery.
I wonder who they're voting for.
And I wonder on what pretext they're voting for them.
I'll bet the majority of them in South Central are voting for Democrats because they believe Democrats for the last 40 years when they've told them, vote for us and we'll get you out of poverty.
Vote for us and we'll get you in schools.
Vote for us and we'll get the end discrimination.
Vote for us, we'll get you out of this neighborhood.
40 years are still in a neighborhood.
40 years, they're still trailing in all these economic indicators.
40 years they're still behind in education.
40 years they're voting for Democrats.
What's wrong here?
Could it be who they're voting for?
And now another Democrat, this new mayor in LA, we need more programs.
We need that.
We need to renew our effort.
We need new housing.
We need this.
We need that.
We need more aid.
We need more aid.
Why?
We need, it's just, it's, it's 40 years is not enough.
40 years rush says, no, it's not enough evidence.
We need more time.
We need more funding.
We need more effort.
40 years was not enough time to revive a neighborhood.
Kidokie.
That's the, yeah, if you want to talk about the southern strategy, the Republicans, let's talk about the Democrats' Eastern strategy.
You want me to define the Democrats' Eastern strategy for you?
Promise everything, deliver very little of it, but keep blaming the Republicans for it.
Register all these African Americans.
Keep them voting for you on the same promises and repeat the cycle.
And just make sure that a couple black leaders sit at the Democrat seat of power table and they'll continue to deliver the votes for you while very little is done so you can continue the notion that all this misery is the fault of the Republicans.
We'll be back in just a moment.
Donald Lambrough has an interesting piece today in the Washington Times.
Anybody who wants to know where American politics is headed should look at the U.S. Census Bureau's eye-popping population shift projections for the next 30 years.
In a nutshell, it forecasts that Americans will continue moving out of the liberal bastions of the Northeast and the Midwest and into the Sunbelt states in the South and the West.
That in turn will boost Republican congressional and electoral clout and further erode the Democrat political base.
Republicans have refastened their electoral lock on the South and the Western Plains and the mountain states, while Democrats have lost electoral strength in the Northeastern and Midwestern states.
And the reason is that many more Americans are moving to places like Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, conservative-leaning states that the GOP has carried with increasing regularity over the last several decades.
The Census Bureau's interim population projections in its first eight years show this political migration will not only continue, but will accelerate over the next 30 years.
You know how many people are moving to Florida?
800 people a day are moving to the state of Florida.
800 people a day, according to the latest figures.
And despite four hurricanes last year, they're moving.
And I saw a story not long ago in the New York Times.
I think it was the weekend review.
It was a very long story.
It must have been the Sunday paper.
And it followed a whole bunch of Long Island families moving to Florida, Sarasota, Tampa, Orlando, precisely because they can't afford it in Long Island anymore.
They can't afford it on the salaries that they earn.
They can't afford housing.
They can't afford the taxes.
They can't afford the schools.
They can't afford anything.
So they get jobs down here in Florida at basically the same amount of money, but there's no state income tax here.
Real estate prices, depending on where you live in the state, are cheaper.
Practically everything is cheaper than it is, say, in New York, be it in the city or one of the boroughs or Long Island, no matter how you slice it.
So, and they were worried about it.
And these people were adamant.
The people that are moving were adamant about why.
They just, and they were willing to leave families.
they were willing to leave long-term made routes because they just can't afford it anymore.
And there was no upward mobility.
There wasn't any more opportunity being produced while all the prices are going up and the taxes are going up.
And this is happening in a number of northeastern states and upper Midwestern states that are currently under Democratic control.
And there are a lot of people moving to states with no state income tax and lower real estate prices for obvious economic reasons, not to mention, you know, lifestyle decisions such as climate and other things.
But even with the incomes as high as they are and as prosperous as they are in certain states, as long as that income is portable, as long as you can find a job paying something similar in a cheaper state, people are moving.
They just can't do it anymore.
And this story by Lamborough, or they just refuse to do it anymore in the current circumstances where they want more flexibility and opportunity.
Basically, they want more disposable income.
The net beneficiary of all this will continue to be the Republican Party, says Merle Black, because the population shift is moving into an environment that's heavily dominated by Republicans already.
Merle Black's the Emory University Professor of Politics and Government, co-author of seminal books on the South's political realignment.
Migration from the Snow Belt industrial north to the South and the West has been underway several decades, but the political effects reached a new milestone in the last three years.
In the 2002 and 2004 exit polls, we saw for the first time a majority of Southern white voters identifying themselves as Republicans and Democratic identification falling to a low 20 to 25 percent.
And that's why John Kerry was saying, you don't need the South to win the White House.
And that's why John Edwards couldn't pull a single Southern state.
And that's why John Edwards is a non-factor in the 2004 election.
But it didn't happen all at once.
The two driving forces for this change were Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
Southern whites who identified themselves as Republicans began to be a plurality in the 80s during the Reagan years.
What we're seeing now, says Mr. Black, is a Bush surge because Bush has been very popular as president in the South.
And, you know, all this talk of Karl Rove and all this talk of the war and Bush lied, it's a Northeastern story.
It's a D.C. story.
It's a Washington Beltway media axis story.
But to these people that are seeking new lives in the South and out west, it's an economic story.
And when you have the economic news that we have this week, the deficit coming down because of an unexpected leap in tax receipts, the whole Democrat theory has just been blown to hell again.
Reagan blew it to hell.
It's been blown to hell again.
Tax rates were cut.
Tax revenue increased.
Same thing as cutting prices at a retail outlet and selling more goods.
It works every time it's tried.
But yet the Democrats can't get off their 30-year-old playbook that tax cuts for the rich lead to the rich hoarding the money and the money coming out of the economy.
It's just the exact opposite.
And so the deficit, which was predicted to be a monster that was going to eat your children, is now down by a third.
And it's not a monster at all.
And in fact, some might even say that the deficit spending spurred economic growth as well.
Deficits aren't all bad, as everybody knows.
So there's great news for people who are seeking a better life in this country because of the presidency of George W. Bush.
And don't think that doesn't irritate Chuck Schumer and Joe Wilson and all the other Democrats inside the Beltway, New York, Boston corridor.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back and wrap it up right after this.
Sadly, my friends, we are out of busy broadcast time.
Many of you at Rush 24-7, the Rush Comments email line, are asking, begging, practically, I've never seen such begging for a fourth hour for us to be able to cover and analyze the Wilson-Schumer press conference.
I'd love to be able to do that, but I have a previously scheduled meeting that I cannot delay nor forego.
But there's a matter.
It'll always be tomorrow, folks.
We'll be able to analyze this, put it in perspective tomorrow.
Just as you watch this, if you do or listen to it, just keep in mind who's who.
Chuck Schumer is Joe Wilson's handler in this agency plot to bring down the Bush administration, the target today being Carl Rohl.
See you tomorrow, and we'll look forward to it.
Cheerio!
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