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Aug. 8, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:37
August 8, 2005, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Now, if you're real perceptive, you may have picked up on something.
Rush isn't here today.
He's not here.
I was listening to the program on Friday, and I heard Rush say that he has to do a celebrity golf outing or a charity golf outing today, and he could not get out of it.
So therefore he had to miss the Monday program.
I'm here because I was able to get out of that Gulf outing.
I was able to use my poll and I'm here.
Rush can't be here today.
We've got a lot to talk about, though.
Thoughts on the passing of Peter Jennings, who, if you did not hear, died uh yesterday in New York battling lung cancer.
I want to talk about the uh estate tax.
Do we have a housing bubble?
The economy is booming again.
I told you so.
I get to say I told you so.
Normally it's Rush that gets to do that.
I'm going to say I told you so later on, but I want to open the program today by talking about the uh situation in Iraq.
The latest polls now show 61% of Americans disapprove of the way President Bush is handling the war in Iraq.
Now the question was put just that way.
Do you approve of the way the president is handling the situation in Iraq, implying that there is some other way of handling it?
Well, there is no other way of handling it other than to leave.
There are some on our side who have suggested we need to take the fight to the enemy more aggressively than we have.
Okay, that's a fair criticism.
And that may have added to the number, but we all know why those numbers are up.
I know why it's 61%.
You can sense the angst all over America.
It's the deaths.
The death toll is not going down, it's going up.
The deaths of American soldiers are increasing in rate, not decreasing.
And I think that there was the hope on the part of a lot of us that the longer this went on, the longer the Iraqi government was in place, that the death toll would begin to go down, that the insurgents would lose heart, they'd start to give up, that as stability would come, so also would come a decrease in the risk for American soldiers, and it has not worked out that way.
You're denying the obvious if you don't think that there's been any an increase in the number of insurgent attacks or terror attacks.
They are going up, and if you think about it, it does make sense.
The stronger the Iraqi government is, the likelier that that government is to hold.
So too is the likelihood of terror attacks.
If that government was teetering or shaky, there wouldn't be a need for terror attacks.
It would be breaking from within.
It's the same thing that motivates all terrorism.
The terrorists never strike shaky governments.
They go after strong ones.
That's why they went after Britain.
It's why they hit us.
It's why the Palestinian terrorists targeted Israel as long as they did.
It is the fact that this thing that is working that is leading to this type of attack.
Which is why you don't have any internal revolution in Iraq.
There aren't demonstrations on the street.
This isn't Vietnam all over again where the Viet Cong, South Vietnamese communists, were openly fighting against their own government and against the United States.
These are terrorist rebels who have to hide.
They often are willing to die when they carry out their plots.
They are acting on behalf of a very, very small minority.
The reason it is happening this way is because the government in Iraq is taking hold and we are achieving our military goals.
And that gets me to the point that I want to address.
And that is whether or not we can allow the tragic death of American soldiers to affect our decision and our decisions on the policies that we have in Iraq.
That can't be the barometer.
It is a separate issue.
It is a tragic issue.
It's real and it can't be ignored, but it is separate and unrelated to the larger question of what are we doing in Iraq and is this war successful?
If we are to judge the success of our military battles on the basis Of how many American casualties there are, then the biggest military disasters in our history were World War II and the Civil War.
Not to mention the revolution, which proportionately took out a huge percentage of the population that lived in America.
It can't be the death count.
That can't be the measure by which we take a look at what's happening in Iraq.
And I'm not saying you don't consider it.
I'm not saying that it is not a compelling, overwhelming American story.
It's just not the barometer by which you can judge the outcome of a war.
The outcome of the war has to be based on two things, and our judgment about the war is based on two things.
The first is are we able to achieve our mission?
Are we able to achieve our mission?
And secondly, is our mission worth it?
Are we leaving the world in a better situation than be when when than before we began the war?
And are we better off than before we began the war?
That's the criteria that we use to adjudge World War II to be one of the greatest successes in the history of our country.
It's the reason why our nation and history has judged the Civil War to have been a success.
The Civil War was terrible.
Not only were Americans dying right and left, it was Americans killing Americans.
There was blood literally all over the nation.
But it was judged to be a success because it was worth it.
So we've got to get past the death toll in evaluating whether or not we are achieving our goals in Iraq.
There's a story last week in the Chicago Tribune.
I want to quote a few paragraphs of it because it addresses this point.
President Bush found himself in a familiar position as he paid tribute to the latest batch of troops killed in Iraq and sought to reassure Americans once again that the rising casualties were worth the cost.
We will stay the course, the President said.
We will complete the job in Iraq.
With each grim milestone in the war, when the number of troop deaths reached 500, then surpassed 1,000, and now inches its way toward 2,000, the President has delivered virtually the same words.
But as the military announced five more U.S. fatalities last week, bringing to 26 the number of Americans killed in the first several days of the month, the Bush administration faced the reality that August is on track to becoming one of the bloodiest months since the war began.
And polls suggest the deaths are straining the patience of Americans, increasing the pressure on the administration to develop an exit strategy.
All right, we take all these polls now, and we didn't do it in the past.
We could have taken this poll in 1943 or even in 1944 and World War II.
Thank God we didn't take polls during the Civil War.
This need to develop an exit strategy based on death is wrong.
The exit strategy, which is important to have, can't be based on the number of American casualties.
It has to be based instead on whether or not the government of Iraq is stable enough to survive without our presence.
It has to be based on whether or not we are still needed in Iraq, and it has to be based upon whether or not there are any gains still to be made by our being there.
But it can't be based on the death toll.
If it is, if it is, and if that becomes our determinant for whether or not we're going to enter a war in the first place or stay the course, we're sending a message to every enemy of the United States as to how to beat us, kill some American soldiers, and that country's going to cut and run.
And I don't want that to be the message.
We can't use that as our basis.
Time to go to the telephones 1-800-282882 is the number at EIB.
Prescott, Arizona, and Jonathan.
Jonathan, you're on Russia's program with Mark Belling.
Hello, Mark.
Um I support President Bush wholeheartedly.
I support the war.
And that's 61% of people, I understand uh quite a bit of it to be people like me who think that Mr. Bush needs to be tougher and show more strength.
But the lefties here want us to be more sensitive on how we kill people.
I I I I have a um my girlfriend's brother-in-law is there now and he says that there are we can't shoot unless we're shot at first.
Uh I'm confused by that.
I do agree with you that there are some who are frustrated over the tactics that are being used in fighting the insurgents.
And I think that that is starting to change.
One of the reasons why the death toll has gone up is we have gotten to be a little bit more proactive in attacking areas where we we believe the insurgents are housed.
I do understand that, and that is real.
And if there is a way to fight this war more aggressively, I am all for it.
But I don't think we can deny the reality that a lot of other Americans just don't like the fact that there are all of these casualties and they see that as a reason to become weak need.
I think we've got to separate those two issues.
If you want to deal with the casualty count, and if you want to deal with those numbers, let's talk about the heroism of the soldiers who are fighting and their families who are making this sacrifice and the fact that they are doing so much more for their country than most of the dissenters and the naysayers and the crybabies are.
That's the story there.
But it can't become the premise upon which we decide whether or not we're going to stay the course.
We can't alter our decisions about whether or not we're going to be in Iraq on the basis of how many people are killed by insurgents, because if that becomes the decision maker, we're just going to get more soldiers killed.
If those insurgents think, if they think the way to get America to leave Iraq is to keep killing more soldiers, you can increase the number of terror attacks exponentially because they know that's the way to run us out of there.
And I don't want that to be the standard that we're going to use to determine A, whether or not the war is successful, and B, whether or not we're going to use that to decide if we're going to stay in Iraq or how we're going to fight the war in Iraq or what our role in Iraq is going to be.
We can't telegraph to the enemy that we are weak and we are not willing to stay the course here because there is now a human toll of this war.
Early on in the war, when we roared into Baghdad and Saddam ran away and went off and hid, it looked as though this war could be won with virtually no American casualties at all.
Well, that's not the reality.
These rebels are fighting back in their cowardly fashion.
That is the reality.
That's there, and it's real.
But it doesn't change whether or not the decision to go to war was correct, and it can't affect the decisions that we make on whether or not we should continue to fight the war.
It is a separate but compelling problem.
My name is Mark Delling and I'm sitting in for Rush on EIB.
I'm Mark Delling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm trying to address a very, very difficult question.
And that is how do you deal with the fact that Americans are dying in Iraq and still say that it's worth it and that we're winning the war.
We live in a society of instant gratification.
Everything's different than it used to be.
We expect everything now.
Everything happens instantly.
The internet.
We get our news, it's bombarded at us.
We get sick of a story after two or three weeks.
This war seems like it's been going on forever.
You've got to introduce some reality into this.
And my point is that the war's success or failure can't be based on the number of American casualties.
If we went out and fought that war and survived Saddam stayed in power and we had to leave, but we limited our casualties to 30, that war would not be successful even though a lot fewer Americans died.
We've got to accept the fact that if we're going to fight a war, many Americans may lose their lives.
But that determination is made when you decide to fight the war in the first place.
And it can't be allowed to change everything once you're in the middle of it.
Waldorf, Maryland, Ralph, Ralph, you're on EIB with Mark Belling.
Hey, how are you doing there?
First time caller finally got through after five years, man.
Great to have you.
Listen, uh, in terms of what you were saying about uh the amount of Americans dying over there, I understand that, and I'm one of the I'm not of the uh population that's crying over the fact that about the amount of uh Americans are dying over there.
It's a bad situation that's military, I understand.
But I think the population of people that are concerned are those who are not concerned so much about the amount of the people dying, it's how they're dying.
The sucker punch mentality of the terrorists is something that we still haven't been able to nail down.
And we need to find some way in soon to try to nail this situation down and how to deal with these sucker punch attacks that we've had.
I know it happened in Vietnam, but we should learn something by now.
Well, the problem with it though is just what you described.
They are sucker punches.
We are not fighting an enemy that is sitting there with platoons in open sight.
We're not fighting an enemy that's wearing soldiers.
It's a very different kind of war.
We're fighting an enemy that is disguising itself by staying within the civilian population, and we're fighting an enemy that runs and hides in homes and mosques and neighborhoods after they throw their punches out there.
The sucker as you know, the sucker punch is always the hardest one to defend oneself against.
But if you look at the larger picture, there's a reason why they have to fight via sucker punch.
They have to fight via sucker punch because they've got no other way to go.
If they're out in the open, they'd be killed by their own people.
They aren't supported by Iraqis, they're not really supported by anyone.
They've got to go this route of the sucker punch because it's the only tactic that they do have.
It is a sign of weakness that they are using it, but you're right, it doesn't change the fact that it is killing Americans, and that's causing tremendous qualms on the part of a lot of folks here as to whether or not we are winning the war.
I think the fact that that's the only way they are able to fight by taking a shot and then running away and hiding, shows that there is no popular support at all in their country for their war.
Can I just address that one on that same note?
Can I just address this one thing?
What you're saying is absolutely right about that, and that's why we need to stay the course because the uh the the uh the other option is not a good one.
If we if we turn and run regardless, they're still going to do what they're gonna do.
They still want to tax, they're still going to uh create terrorism in many places.
So running is not the answer.
So people need to understand that this is not a war that we should just be running from.
We need to stay the course because the other option is not a viable one.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you for the call.
Outstanding comments.
He's right in using that term, the sucker punch.
That is exactly what the terrorists in Iraq are using, the sucker punch, and it is a new military tactic.
Terrorism is still a relatively new phenomenon.
We did not have a lot of it in earlier conflicts.
Here it strikes as much not at our soldiers, obviously they're bearing the brunt of it, but it strikes at the American people because it is different.
It is unconventional.
It's something that we're having having a hard time coping with, that our soldiers can be on patrol and all of a sudden somebody's gonna come out and kill them simply because they are there.
Louisville, Kentucky, Tim, Tim, you're on Russia's program with Mark Belling.
It's a privilege to be on.
Thank you.
I get frustrated with the media because the terrorists said the other day, you know, this is going to be another Vietnam, and then they just pick up their talking point from terrorists and start calling us Vietnam.
All we have to do is look at the history of warfare.
Where has so much territory been conquered and occupied for two years and only lose a little less than two thousand troops?
That's a phenomenally run war.
And everybody's just so oblivious to history that they can't even see what a great job we're doing.
If we're going to count casualties and use them as a determinant of the success of the war, you are right.
We have lost a relatively small number of soldiers.
But that's hard to sell to the family that's lost those soldiers or that community.
And that's why it's a difficult point to make.
But you are right.
We have taken we have made incredible accomplishments during the brief time that we've been fighting this war, and the casualty count has been by historical standards relatively low.
But whether it is or it isn't, it doesn't change the larger reality, and that is that Saddam Hussein isn't running Iraq, a democratically elected government is running Iraq, they're on the verge of passing a constitution, they've managed to put together a coalition of a number of different factions who have never been able to stand one another, and they have the overwhelming backing of the majority of their people.
By every standard that you can imagine, that's a success from the more important point of is it all worth it?
If President Bush is right, and we can introduce democracy into what had been a Middle Eastern dictatorship that was very friendly to terrorists, You're introducing the possibility of a new way.
They don't have to look merely at living under a dictator like Saddam, embracing terrorism.
They've got that third option of self-governance.
The president believes, and he staked his entire presidency on it.
The president believes that that is the thing that will change the dynamic permanently in the Middle East.
Provide a different way.
You don't have to just kill the great Satan of the West.
You don't have to live under the kind of terror that Saddam gave you.
You can actually control your own futures.
You can choose your own leaders.
You can have freedom.
Even now, the New York Times today has a story about some women's groups in Iraq are worried about whether or not the new constitution is going to shortchange women's rights.
The fact that they can even think about having rights shows you how far we have come in such a very short time.
This is the Rush Limbaugh program.
My name is Mark Belling, filling in for one day only.
Rush will be back tomorrow.
Rush Limbaugh.com is your site for all of your club getmo needs.
We will have Get Mo News yet this hour.
Depending on your perspective, it either indicates that yes, we are abusing those people, or they've got a better than we would have dreamed, but that depends on your perspective.
I'll share that with you.
A little bit later this hour.
Right now we are discussing the increase in the number of casualties, American soldiers in Iraq, the increasing death count, the growing public disapproval of the way the president is handling the war.
And my contention that the death toll can't be the criteria that we use in evaluating the war.
To use the standards of today's American media, the low point of World War II was D-Day.
To use the standards of the media, the Civil War was the ultimate American disaster.
You know, all the lefties have these bumper stickers.
War is never the answer.
The Royal In fact, war historically has always been the only answer that ever corrects the most profound problems we have.
If war isn't the answer, we'd still be subservient to the British.
War wasn't the answer.
Half the country would have slaves.
War wasn't the answer.
Adolf Hitler would be running all of Europe and would have tried once he obtained full nuclear technology to take over the world.
Sometimes you have to fight wars.
This war that we fought, we managed to win the early stages very easily, without having to pay a large human price.
Because the enemy didn't fight.
Saddam, once he saw what was going on, ran away.
What you have though is a different group.
This isn't the Bath Party.
This isn't even the remnants of Saddam.
This is Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups who are terrified of what the notion of a free Iraq means.
And they are now fighting in the only way that terrorists know how to fight.
Cowardly, sneak attacks, suicide bombings in which they take their weakest and most influ easily influenced people and tell them to die on behalf of a cause that they're never going to die for.
That's what we're fighting now.
It's because we've succeeded in Iraq that we are facing this now.
But do understand that it is the price that we are paying for victory, not for defeat.
Redlands, California, Mitchell Mitchell, you're on Russia's program with Mark Belling.
Hello, sir.
I'm a proud member of the United States military, and I just wanted to say that I think that uh I believe I I mean I bel I understand the greeting parents about their their sholders, uh uh sons and daughters.
But I think uh America has forgotten what the military is for.
The military is not a corporation.
Uh their job is to go out, uh break things, shoot people, blow things up, and in the process, they're probably going to die.
Now, not probably a minority is going to a minority are going to die.
And there's this expectation that we've had that no one would die, but you are right.
When you sign up when you enlist, you are taking that risk that you will die.
And that's why the soldiers are the soldiers understand this.
This 61% Isn't coming from the people who are fighting the war or the people who may be sent over there.
They all understand that risk.
I don't think they're conned or lied to when they go to the recruiting station.
They know the reality that they may be called upon to fight this war.
And if you listen to the soldiers who come back and the ones that are interviewed, they say, look, we know we're winning.
We see the support that we have.
We see how the Iraqi police and the Iraqi military gets a little bit stronger every day.
We understand that we're winning.
the resistance is coming from americans back home were nowhere near as strong as our soldiers and that that that i thought i think it the base problem here is you have you have this uh...
you have this so well you know this guy died let's bring them all home no the mission is not completed If the mission does not get completed, then we have failed utterly.
I agree with you on that.
Then there's no point.
If we quit and the Iraqi and we quit too early, and the Iraqi government falls, and this country becomes something worse than it was under Saddam, it becomes what Lebanon was in the 1980s, in which there are 19 million factions fighting for control.
Terrorists go in and use it as their training grounds because there is no real governance.
If we let that happen, then we did fail.
Then we failed.
We may save in the short term some American lives by running away at that stage, but in the long run, it will be a failure.
And we've got to stop making our decisions as to whether or not we're succeeding in war on the basis of death tolls.
And in saying this, I don't want people to think that I'm suggesting that the death toll is not a real issue.
It is a terrible ramification of the fact that we are fighting an immoral enemy.
The death toll is there not because of what we are doing, but because there are terrorists in the radical Islamic world that want to kill us because they don't want their own countrymen in Iraq and their own fellow Muslims to have the same opportunities for freedoms that you and I have.
They are the ones that are doing it.
We are not doing this.
Thank you for the comments.
I appreciate it, Mitchell.
To Kensington, Connecticut, John.
John, you're on EIB with Mark Belling.
I agree with the war, but I disagree that we should also flip side that coin.
We shouldn't use the death toll as a reason to justify staying.
And I do hear people uh that agree with the war say that to honor those dead, we can't cut and run.
I don't think we should cut and run.
I think that we should uh be more aggressive in the way we win this war and get it over with.
Going door to door in Felusha, in my opinion, was a travesty.
You're putting American lives at risk going door to door so you don't hurt anyone's feelings.
That's crazy.
They're walking a real fine line there.
They do realize that if the Iraqi population turns against the United States presence, then that then we have a real problem, and that has not happened.
The reason why this isn't Vietnam is that ninety-eight percent of the Iraqis support the presence of the American military as opposed to Vietnam, where the Vietnamese were fighting themselves.
That's the big difference there.
So I understand why it seems like they may be tiptoeing around when they're approaching this, and I understand that there's a frustration that we're not being more aggressive in fighting the war, and I'd like to see maybe a little bit more aggression.
Now you didn't make a you did make a very good point, and that is that no, to honor these soldiers, that's not a reason to stay either.
The reason to stay is whether or not we are achieving our goal, and whether or not our goal is going to be and whether or not the achievement of that goal is greater by being there.
That's got to be the criteria.
I wouldn't make any decision predicated on a belief that ninety-eight percent of the people in Iraq want us to be there because I think that number is suspect.
I think we should be there because we want to be there.
Oh, I agree with that.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree with you.
I agree with you on that.
But it will be a lot easier for that government to sustain itself and to keep order if it is supported by the Iraqi people as opposed to one that is perceived as illegitimate or a puppet of the United States.
And that hasn't been the case.
And trust me, if that was a feeling that was held by anything more than a tiny minority of Iraqis, our media would be trumpeting it.
The man on the street interviews throughout Iraq would be nonstop if there was an overwhelming Opposition or even an underwhelming opposition to American presence.
There's almost no opposition.
That's why you don't see any Iraqis saying America go home.
It just isn't happening.
But I do I do think that that is one of the criteria that we have to use because the long-term stability of that government is part of determining whether or not we're achieving our goals.
But you are right.
The decision on when we leave, or for that matter, on how long we stay, should be based on one thing, and that is our interests.
Are we achieving our interests?
Are we served by being there rather than allow the decision to be made by by anyone else?
And I certainly don't want it to be made by a bunch of terrorists who think that they can alter American foreign policy by killing a handful of our soldiers.
I don't want to reward them.
I don't want to honor those people by allowing them to have veto power over whether or not we're going to fight a war.
You know what?
If if we don't finish up, they they will be able to turn um through the use of the American media, turn popular opinion against this war, and we may very well have another Vietnam under our hands.
So as far as I'm concerned, we should turn the juice up and get this thing over with.
And we are gonna be there forever.
Well, it's 50 years old.
We are gonna be there for my entire lifetime and maintain the presence because we need the oil from the uh the region.
Well, we're certainly going to be in we're certainly going to be in the Middle East.
We're still in Germany.
We're still in Europe, but I do think the potential of having a more stable Iraq with a lessening of the amount of terrorism, that's something that is likely to happen, but it's only going to happen in time as the new Iraqi government can prove and justify its own presence, and as the support for the terrorist movement continues to wane, and I do think that's happening in the Islamic world as well.
I believe more Muslims are beginning to are starting to turn against terrorism now that they do see that there is that other option of self-determination rather than have to think that we can only be ruled by the Mulas of Iran or a Saddam Hussein or the kings of Saudi Arabia, that we've got the opportunity for self-determination.
That's going to go a long way toward ending Iraq uh Muslim popular support for the tactic of terrorism.
My name is Mark Bellings sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
I've been talking about the casualty count in Iraq as the terror attacks escalate.
One of the things that we've not been seeing much of is opposition from the families of soldiers.
There just isn't much of it going on.
The vast, vast, vast majority of them support the war.
They're proud of their sons and daughters and their family members.
They wish they weren't there.
They wish they could come home and they worry about them.
But they're proud of them and they support the cause and they support the mi I've met some of these people.
I'll be out.
I'm from Milwaukee.
I'll be out somewhere, and someone will say, I appreciate your program, by the way.
My son is serving in Iraq.
Or I've got a niece in Iraq.
I've even met some of those soldiers who have been in Iraq and who are back.
We've got a unit from my own city that has been deployed to Iraq.
They come back and they'll say the same thing over and over again.
I've never heard one of them complain about the mission.
I've never heard one of them make a statement in opposition to the war.
I've never heard one of them say anything other than we believe that this cause is just, and that's what the majority of them who have lost someone say.
But when you find someone who's got a differing point of view, the media is going to be all over them.
There's this woman named Cindy Sheehan.
She's from Vacaville, California.
She's gone down to the president's ranch in Crawford, Texas, and she's staked out a spot and she's demanding the right to meet the president and talk about the death in Iraq of her son.
She's already met him.
The president had her in and spoke to her.
She wants to talk to him again.
And she's demanding a meeting, and of course they're not giving her one.
She's opposed to the war and she wants to tell the president off.
So she's sitting there, camped out where all the media is.
The media have nothing to do when they're down there at the ranch.
There's nothing for them to cover.
So here's this mother of a soldier who died demanding a meeting with the president.
Well, there's no way they can deny themselves that story.
Say, we can we could we can show that even the soldiers' families are against the war.
Then the president won't.
Well, he's already met with her.
She's commented on this.
Today's New York Times.
Uh quote, in Ms. Sheehan's telling, Mr. Bush did not know her son's name when she and her family met with him in June of 2004 at Fort Lewis.
Mr. Bush, she said, acted as if he were at a party and behaved disrespectfully toward her by referring to her as mom throughout the meeting.
That's not disrespectful.
It was the president's way of empathizing and being warm.
I suspect that almost every mother of a soldier who had died in that situation would appreciate that.
But this is this woman's rationale now for holding this grudge.
Back to the story by Ms. Sheehan's account.
Mr. Bush said to her that he could not imagine losing a loved one, like an aunt or uncle or cousin.
Miss Sheehan said she broke in and told Mr. Bush that Casey was her son, and that she thought he could imagine what it would be like, since he has two daughters, and that he should think about what it would be like sending them off to war.
I said, Trust me, you don't want to go there, Ms. Sheehan said, recounting her exchange with the president.
He said, You're right.
I don't.
I said, Well, thanks for putting me there.
So she wants to meet with him again, so she can tell him off again.
And after she meets with him, she'll find some problem with his attitude.
I don't want to be overly critical of anyone who lost a son in this war.
She's saying that the president was being cavalier and saying that he can't imagine what it would be.
I can't imagine what that would be like.
It has to be absolutely terrible.
But she can't be given a free pass to act in such a self-indulgent way.
This is becoming all about her and all about her desire to make her point.
We have lost nearly two thousand soldiers in this war.
You don't see most of those you don't see any of those other parents acting in this fashion, demanding a second meeting, demanding the right to tell the president this, that, or the other thing, because most of them are mature enough to know that that's not proper.
The president staff's in an incredibly difficult situation.
If they say no, it looks like they're completely callous toward this woman's feelings, and that the president is indifferent to the human suffering.
If they say yes, everybody who wants to go in and talk to the president and tell him why he's all wet about Iraq is going to want to take advantage of that opportunity.
This is very similar to the handful of 9-11 victims who have chased television cameras around ever since the terror attack on our own country and claim to speak for everyone else.
They only ever really spoke for themselves.
They've suffered a terrible loss and obviously they have anger, but they're displacing it.
President Bush did send them there, but President Bush didn't kill them.
They were killed by terrible people.
Those terrible people are trying to run the entire Islamic world, and they're trying to change the policy of the United States and the rest of the free world.
And that's who Ms. Sheehan needs to be furious with, not their president.
And I do think President Bush fully understands what happens when he sends our troops to war.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush.
Mark Belling's sitting in for Rush.
We've got a lot of territory to cover on today's program.
I'm getting a little wobbly on the whole estate tax thing.
I need to be bucked up on that.
We'll be dealing with that.
Probably in the third hour today, but I've got some gitmo news, some news from the U.S. President Guantanamo Bay.
According to the Washington Times, the number one most requested reading material at Getmo is the Harry Potter books.
Now you can look at this one of two ways.
You can either use this as proof that we're not abusing them, that they're not being denied all these liberties, or you can look at it as proof that Dick Durbin was right, that this absolutely Is a torture chamber.
Where am I going to read the Harry Potter books?
The uh head of the library says that the J.K. Rowling tales about the boy wizard are on the top of the request list for the camps 520 Al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects, followed by Agatha Christie, who done it.
Okay.
So they all want to read the Harry Potter books.
Now I'm an agnostic on Harry Potter.
I've never read any of the books and I've not seen the movies.
I have friends who tell me it's actually pretty good.
I have others who say that it's all voodoo.
I do know this.
If that's what they're reading at Guantanamo, it's not exactly a concentration camp.
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