The views expressed by the host on this show make more sense than anything anybody else out there happens to be saying because of one thing.
The views expressed by the host on this program are rooted in a relentless, unstoppable pursuit of the truth.
And we find it.
And we proclaim it.
And you gotta have the courage to face the truth if you're gonna listen to this program, otherwise you'll go nuts.
And you'll sound like they sound on those Democrat blogs and websites.
Greetings.
Welcome back, Ditto Cam on for the final two hours.
The Roberts hearings are in recess for about another hour and ten minutes.
We have uh just one more soundbite I want to play for you uh until we get the the Biden sound, uh, which was uh to date, uh probably the uh biggest example of fireworks that we have uh that we've had.
This uh oh, by the way, telephone number if you want to be on the program 800 2822 eight eight two.
Email address is rush at eIBNet.com.
Senator Charles Grassley asked the following question.
Do you agree with the view that the courts, rather than the elected branches, should take the lead in creating a more just society?
Again, it is the obligation of the courts to decide particular cases.
Um often that means uh acting on the side of justice as we understand it, enforcing the bill of rights, enforcing the equal protection clause.
But it has to be in the context of a case, and it has to be in the context of interpreting a provision that's implicated in that case.
They don't have a license to go out and decide.
I think this is an injustice, and so I'm going to do something to fix it.
That type of uh uh uh judicial role, I think is inconsistent with the role the framers intended.
When they have to decide a case, it may well, from time to time, in particular cases, put them in the role of vindicating the vision of justice that the framers enacted in the Constitution, and that is a legitimate role for them, but it's always in the context of deciding a proper case that's been presented.
This is pretty solid answer.
The uh check during the uh break here at the top of the hour.
Some conservatives are getting a little antsy out there over the apparent Roberts strategy of non-answering questions in which he is asked for decisions or uh opinions as to how he would rule on specific cases, either hypothetical or actual.
Some uh some nervous twitches out there uh that this may uh uh make it appear as though the Republicans have put some forth put forth someone that uh uh we need to hide that we can't be honest about.
Uh and of course I well uh f that that sort of uh uh amuses me that that view.
This is simply the Ginsburg rule uh that uh that is being followed here.
And of course the the effort to get Roberts to answer specific or hypothetical cases uh is is no more than an attempt to trick him up.
And it's it's it's clear that that he understands uh uh what the process here is and how he needs to get through this in order to be confirmed.
Uh and that's as I as I mentioned last uh last hour.
This whole confirmation process is is a little it's it's it's gotten so blown out of proportion over what its original intent was.
And in fact, if you go back and look at some of the early days, you'll find that the confirmation process took two days, three days, four days, as uh as recently as 50, 60 years ago.
Not months uh and and multiple months uh as uh they can sometimes take now.
And one of the the strange things is that there's no accountability for judges.
Once they're on the bench, whatever they said in their confirmation hearings cannot be thrown up at them.
For example, if Robert said Roe versus Laway to settle law and Roe versus Wade is part of the American fabric, and no Senator, I will not overturn it.
And then he goes and overturns it.
Or votes to overturn.
What are they gonna do to him?
Other than write nasty things about him in the newspaper, uh, which they're gonna do anyway, depending on how he votes.
Uh, but there's no accountability.
So there's no sense of sticking your neck out here.
You know, that this is not the time to prove your intellectual might against a bunch of gnats.
Uh that that that's that the the pseudo scholars of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Um and I've I I say that with all due respect.
I mean, I've th you've got a guy here who is what he is.
He's an obvious judicial and legal scholar, and the senators are senators.
Uh some of them are lawyers, but they're not nearly the scholar that he is.
Uh that having been said, there are a lot of conservatives that are a little bit concerned.
Uh are we getting another suitor?
I you know, I I I read the conservative blogs.
I read a lot of uh things that uh cross the spectrum on the blogs and on the uh internet left and right, and there is a that there's a there's a lingering defeatism on the conservative side.
It's born of experience.
Uh we were told suitor was gonna be great, and we get suitor, you know, who was the one of the deciding votes in the uh in the Kilo case, uh eminent domain, basically saying that governments can choose the higher taxpayer uh in in awarding ownership of property.
Suter was a major disappointment.
Anthony Kennedy was thought to be something that he's turned out not to be.
The debate is what changes him.
Some people think, well, these guys read the newspapers too, and they have their legacies and they want to be thought of uh for eternity as brilliant and great contributors to the American judicial process, so they're affected by what's written about them, and they try to please their critics, uh, human nature and so forth.
Uh but already there are there are some people fretting over Robert's lack or of uh unwillingness to answer some specific questions.
Uh there's oh no, have we been sandbagged again?
Oh no, have we been let down?
Oh no, I don't know enough about this guy.
Is Bush pulling a fast one on us?
Blah, blah, blah.
That kind of thing is starting to reverberate out there.
Not everywhere by any stretch of the imagination.
On the left, uh there are some sighs of relief over Robert's answers to questions about privacy and starry decisis, the uh settled nature of law when uh considering precedent and whether to overturn it.
But the main thing I'm picking up reading the left wing blogs is they're bored.
They're bored.
Uh they they're no fireworks here.
They expect this guy to be destroyed by now.
They expected a heavy artillery to come out.
They wanted his guy to be blown to the moon.
And he hasn't been yet.
So they're bored.
Uh some on the right, and as I say, not all are getting antsy that uh we've all been sandbagged with this choice.
And we won't know until he gets confirmed and starts working uh what the uh what the case is on that score.
So I mentioned before the top of the hour break, President Bush today said he takes responsibility for the federal government's failure in responding to Hurricane Katrina.
He said Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government, and to the extent the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility.
Said this just before noon in his joint news conference with the Iraqi president Jalal Talabani.
Bush said he wants to know what went right, what went wrong, so that he can determine whether the U.S. was prepared for another storm or an attack.
I'm not gonna defend the process going in, but I'm gonna defend the people who are on the front line of saving lives.
Now, there's a there's a reason for doing this.
One is stanch the bleeding.
Uh this is something that the pictures are out there.
It would be silly to argue, and but even ev this is frustrating, I know.
It would be silly to argue, hey, wait, FEMA was there earlier than they were in other hurricanes.
FEMA did this, FEMA did well, the pictures don't tell that story, and you've got to deal with the reality that we are a picture-driven society, and the pictures tell a story that nobody was there helping people.
Uh all the little details are a bit too esoteric to uh to portray in a mass basis and sway public opinion on this.
For example, the uh Red Cross.
Uh say, hey, we were ready to go to the Superdome and the Convention Center.
We had pallets of water, we had all kinds of food, but Louisiana State government wouldn't let us go anywhere near there because they didn't want the superdome or the convention center to become a magnet for more people.
We're trying to get them out.
Okay, you can say that all day long.
There's no picture of that.
So this is to stanch the bleeding, and uh uh th this is you know, the the i it it it makes sense to me that Bush is doing this.
It's not gonna buy him anything with critics.
Uh but it will help alleviate some disconcertedness in the general public over this.
Uh by the same token, uh you could compare the president taking responsibility for this to the aftermath of the Waco invasion.
Does anybody remember what happened in the aftermath of the Waco invasion?
Mr. President, are you uh responsible for uh I think you better go talk to the Attorney General about that?
I was out of the loop on this.
I think Janet Reno's who you need to ask about uh what happened at that Waco thing.
Uh what this is also going to cause a little prediction here.
Okay, Mr. President, you've finally taken responsibility for the screw up in New Orleans.
Are you willing to take responsibility for the screw up in Iraq?
You know, the way the left operates, okay, we got him to admit one, now let's go for gold.
Let's get him to admit every screw up he's ever made, and if he won't admit it, they will keep badgering him and so forth, and in essence, give him no credit for uh taking responsibility for this.
So those are my predictions.
We'll see uh how long it takes for me to be proven right.
In the meantime, a quick timeout, we'll be back and continue in mere moments.
America's anchor man seated at the Limbo Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
To the phones we go.
People have been patiently waiting, and I thank you for that.
This Jeff in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
Hello, sir.
You're up first.
It's an honor to speak with you, sir.
Thank you.
I just wanted the audio you uh played from last hour regarding uh Patrick Leahy being the deciding vote to get out of Vietnam.
I was kind of in shock that he was proud of that.
If that were me and I consigned millions of people to communism and impression, I wouldn't be boasting about it in public.
And I don't really feel like being lectured by such a man, to be honest with you.
Well, join the club.
Um I I don't like being lectured to by anybody, uh, particularly uh somebody like Senator DePenn's.
Uh let's go back and play the bite so people know what it is that you are uh talking about.
Leahy asked Judge Roberts uh this morning a hypothetical question about uh separation of powers.
The question was this.
Judge Roberts, you rat.
Uh that's assumed.
Your memo suggests that Congress is powerless to stop a president who's going to conduct an unauthorized war.
I'll give you a hypothetical.
Congress passes a law for all U.S. forces to be withdrawn from the territory of a foreign nation by a set date.
The president vetoes a law.
The Congress overrides that, sets into law you must withdraw by a certain date.
Now, is there any question in your mind that the president would be bound to faithfully execute that law?
I don't want to answer a particular hypothetical that could come before the court, but I'm happy to comment on the memorandum that you you're discussing.
That's uh I mean uh isn't this kind of hornbook law?
I don't know if any cases are coming before the court.
I mean, this is kind of hornbook the the Congress says to the President, you gotta get out and pass a law which is either signed into law by the President or you override a presidential veto.
Why wouldn't the President have to charge as he is under the Constitution to faithfully execute the law?
Why wouldn't he have to follow that law?
Well, Senator, that issue of and similar issues have in fact come up.
There were, for example, lawsuits concerning the legality of the war in Vietnam, uh various efforts, and certainly the arguments would be made on the other side about the president's authority, and that may well come before the court.
Leahy responded thus.
Judge, with all due respect, the uh the cases in in Vietnam were not based on a specific law passed by Congress to get out.
I mean, Congress did cut off the funding in April 1975 by one vote margin in the uh armed services committee.
I know because I was the newest member of the committee at that time, uh voted to not authorize the war any longer.
But are you saying that Congress could not pass a law that we must withdraw forces?
No, Senator, I'm not.
As I said last hour, this is an attempt to trick him up on a separation of powers question.
I'm sure that what Lahey wanted him to get into was, hey, President's commander-in-chief, uh, Senator, and the Constitution is very clear on the duties and responsibilities of Commander in Chief.
Uh and and Leahy thought he had him set up here Because the trick question was the second question.
Well, wait a minute.
What about cutting off funding?
Which which I I was a very proud member of the Armed Services Committee of first year in Congress when that happened.
This is what upset Jeff in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
You have to under Jeff, you have to understand this, you have to the left thinks one of their greatest achievements was the United States defeat in the Vietnam War.
And that has served as the template for the way the left views all wars since, since they assumed that that victory meant they had a lot of power.
They were able to tell a president of the United States to get the hell out of that country.
We don't want to be there anymore, and you're not going to keep us there, and we're not going to vote one more penny for it.
And Ergo's.
This is why I have kept saying all since the Iraq debate.
Well, hey, look, Democrats, if you're so opposed to the war, cut off the funding.
Because that's the way to do it.
If you're so opposed to it, simply don't provide any more money.
Put your votes where your mouths are.
And we haven't seen that happen.
So this is just a little trick question here.
Roberts uh parried it pretty well.
Vicky, or I'm sorry, Vic, Vic in Peoria, Illinois.
Welcome to the program.
Nice to have you with us.
Hi, it's nice to be here.
I just was hoping that somebody would ask him something to me that really had some substance like about the Patriot Act, because that cuts right to the heart of the Constitution with me.
Well, give it time.
I mean, this is only the first half day of questioning, and the real the hired guns have not even shown up here at the OK Corral yet.
Senator Turban and Senator Schumer.
Yeah, but they continue to ask things that matter only like about abortion.
It's wrong to begin with.
Well, maybe it only matters to a minuscule part of the public.
Yeah, give them time.
Give them time.
This this is this is supposed to go on for hours and hours.
Roberts may be there a couple of days doing this.
It's waste of time, really, because he's not going to say anything stupid.
No, you're misunderstand.
The point of asking questions about abortion, uh for for for Senator Specter, there's there's two possibilities.
A, he genuinely cares about.
I mean, he's a pro-choister.
He's he's a tried and true.
Pro-choice Spectre all the way through, very, very liberal Republican Pennsylvania, and is probably very concerned about what Roberts is going to do here as uh Chief Justice.
On the Democrat side, Democrats haven't really gone to abortion much because uh Spectre carried the water there.
Now, Spectre could, you know, he wasn't, he didn't he didn't bore in and demand a yes or no answer.
He tried to get one, but he didn't demand it.
He was going inside doors and back doors, but he didn't he didn't demand it, he didn't get one.
Uh the Democrats will will certainly come back to this at some point, but I think Spectre might also have been trying to run a little interference for Roberts on this at the same time.
But you have to understand here, Vic, these questions about abortion are to keep Ralph Neeves, the nags, and the Nayroll gang happy.
These are the people that fund the Democratic Party to a great extent.
And if uh these questions have to be asked by these senators in order for them to get the approval of people of the American way, Nay Rall and the Nags and the rest of these special interest groups.
Uh they have to bore in on that.
Patriot Act, I'm sure it's coming.
Uh I don't know if they've drawn straws on the Democrat side to determine who gets what subjects, but you know they've coordinated this.
Uh some senators traditionally keep from other senators a couple of areas they're gonna bore into because they like to uh spring surprises on the nominee and stand out.
So I'm sure, for example, if there have been meetings between Schumer and Turbin, Kennedy and Leahy and Feingold and Feinstein, and Feinstein, when she gets, she's she's she's gonna she could probably lead the Democratic side on the abortion questioning.
Uh but when they when they assign areas of responsibility, uh, you know there have been these meetings, and I'm uh I'll guarantee you the Patriot Act, Patriot Act is uh is gonna be a substantial uh area that uh that they dig into.
So just just be patient.
With hearings like this that are scheduled to go on for hours and hours and hours, sort of like this radio program.
The audience cannot expect me to get everything in in the first hour.
That's why we do three hours here.
Uh and the same thing with his hearings, they can't get to um uh they can't get to this guy with everything they want at the outset.
There's also a lot of strategy in this.
Okay, let's go easy.
I'm just guessing.
Let's go easy at first.
Let's make the guy think it's not gonna be as tough as he was led to believe.
And then we'll come in with the big firepower when we think that he's sitting back on his heels and taking it easy.
Any number of things that go on.
Remember what's at stake here.
It's not really Roberts because he's just replacing Rehnquist.
So there's no change in the so-called balance of power.
But markers are going to be set down here for the next pick, the next nominee, whoever it is.
By markers I mean the Democrats are going to say, okay, we'll go this far on accepting this kind of conservative, but we're not going to go any further.
Sort of a warning to President Bush and the Republicans on the next pick.
Back in just a sec, folks.
Doing the thinking for you, folks.
All you have to do is be a sponge.
Just soak it up.
Love saying those things just to tweak the critics.
We are here executing assigned host duties flawlessly because I assign them.
And therefore I am incapable of screwing up 800 282-2882 if you want to be on the uh program.
We are we're about ready here to give you Joe Biden the uh soundbites of Biden questioning uh Judge Roberts.
Uh about the only real fireworks that uh that have transpired today that's not that big a deal, but uh in in in uh comparison to other hearings, but nevertheless, we will have it for you.
Greg in Pearl, Mississippi.
Welcome to the program, sir.
It's nice to have you with us.
Oh, what an honor.
And mega non-wining Mississippi Ditto's rush.
It's uh great to talk to you.
And I I just want to brag on the great job that our governor Haley Barber's doing here in Mississippi.
It's it's night and day between what's going on here and what we're seeing on the news out of Louisiana.
Yeah, I know.
I I uh in fact, we're gonna be talking next week to Governor Barber uh in the uh interview for the next issue of the limbul letter.
Uh and I specifically want to talk to him about that and uh a number of other things.
But I I made this observation yesterday.
Uh, you know, we we we keep hearing about the federal response being bad up.
Bush wanted to target New Orleans and the blacks and all that is silly stuff.
And it it is it is painfully obvious here that what you have, when you compare not only Mississippi, but look at Florida.
Florida's had five earthquakes uh five hurricanes in the last two years.
You didn't see in these five hurricanes, you haven't seen one shred of evidence that makes it look like what happened in New Orleans, and you haven't seen anything like what happened in New Orleans and Mississippi or Alabama, as you point out.
Uh and yet the federal response has been in both places, uh, all three Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.
But somehow in New Orleans, the federal government didn't do everything right, yet they apparently did in these other places.
That's not correct.
The correct answer is the local and state officials in Florida and in Mississippi handled the situation locally as best they could at first, and they had control of it.
Uh I I mentioned yesterday that there was a there was a great story in the Sunday Palm Beach Post about how Florida regularly had they have all their experts in all these different districts, and they regularly meet throughout the year on their hurricane plans, and they have mock drills, and they're constantly updating things, even if no hurricane has happened from the time of the last meeting to the next scheduled meeting.
And they've done this for years and years and years, and it none of the planning involves FEMA.
None of the none of the initial reaction and execution of plans involves the federal government at all.
You read this Palm Beach Post story, you don't even find references to the federal government in terms of the immediate execution of plans taking place in the state of Florida.
And it's it's a stark contrast.
So what you have on display here is not really the failure of the federal government.
What you have on display is the failure of a bunch of things.
You have the failure of a liberal Democrat-run community.
You have the what what the most obvious thing to me here is the is the failure of the war on poverty.
You know, we we we hear the left keeps trying to tell us, no, no, no, no, Rush.
What's actually happening out there is that we are finally learning the depth of poverty in America.
No, we're not learning the depths of poverty in America.
We're learning the depths of poverty In a city that has been run by Democrats for who knows how many generations.
And we are witnessing the failure of the entitlement mentality.
We are witnessing the failure of the welfare state.
We are witnessing the failure of the war on poverty.
That's what we're witnessing.
That's the real lesson to learn.
It's what I was talking yesterday about when I said there are two realities.
You have the media reality that is created in conjunction with the with the Democrats and the Liberals.
And then you have reality.
You have what is, and then you have the creation of an alternative reality by the media.
Well, the truth is what I just said, the media reality is that somehow the government's not big enough, the federal government isn't big enough, federal government is not peopled by the right leaders, The federal government didn't care about these people because they're poor.
All this is a manufactured reality.
All of this is a false reality that has been combined with a bunch of pictures that are out of context.
Let me get into some of this, in fact, right now.
Uh what since you brought this up, and I'm I'm glad uh Greg that you called.
First, let me cite George Will today in his Washington Post column.
It took exactly one month until the President's primetime news conference of October 11th, 2001, to refute the notion that September 11th changed everything.
When a reporter said you haven't called for any sacrifices from the American people, he replied, Well, you know, I think the American people are sacrificing now.
I think they're waiting in airport lines longer than they've ever had before.
And that was before the sacrificing became really hellacious with the requirement that passengers remove their shoes at security checkpoints.
The idea that Hurricane Katrina would change the only thing that matters, thinking, perished even more quickly at about the time Louisiana Senator Mary Landrew, a suitable symbol of congressional narcissism, dramatized the severity of the tragedy by taking a television interviewer on a helicopter flight over her destroyed Beach House.
Washington rolled the dice in Louisiana lost, she said in a speech on the Senate floor that moved some senators to tears.
You can no more embarrass a senator than you can embarrass a sofa.
So the tears were not accompanied by blushing about having just passed a transportation bill, whose 6,371 pork projects cost 24 billion dollars, about ten times more than the price of the levy New Orleans needed.
Louisiana's congressional delegation larded the bill with 540 million five hundred eighty thousand two hundred dollars worth of earmarks, one-fifth the price of a capable levy.
America's always fast flowing river of race obsessing has overflowed its banks.
And last Sunday on ABC's This Week, Senator Barack Obama, Illinois' freshman Democrat, applied to the expression of old banalities of fluency that would be beguiling were it not without content, were it without content.
Unfortunately, it included the requisite lament about the president's inadequate empathy and an amazing criticism of the government's historic indifference and its passive indifference that is as bad as active malice.
The Senator is 44.
He's just 30 months older than the war on poverty that President Johnson declared in January of 1964.
Since the indifference, since then, the indifference that Senator Obama refers to as bad, as active malice, has been expressed in more than 6.6 trillion dollars of anti-poverty spending, strictly defined.
So once again, here we have the example here of a false reality.
Barack Obama, 44 years old, black goes on television, says Bush didn't care, had no empathy, and uh and that this is this is nothing more than the historic indifference and the passive indifference.
There has been no indifference to poverty in this country, to the tune of $6.6 trillion of wealth transfers since 1964.
Now, just 10 years ago that figure was three trillion uh uh three uh three trillion truth.
Yeah, it was a little over three trillion, maybe twelve years ago was three trillion dollars.
Now it's six point six trillion dollars, and you've got Democrats going on TV talking about indifference, passive indifference, active Indifference, actively not caring.
Senator Obama is called a new kind of Democrat, which often means one with new ways of ignoring evidence discordant with old liberal orthodoxies about using cash.
Much of it spent through liberalism's caring professions to cope with cultural collapse.
Barack might, however, care to note that not all recondite rules for avoiding poverty.
Graduate from high school, don't have a baby till you're married, don't marry while you're a teenager.
Among people who obey those rules, poverty is minimal.
But of course, you can't say that.
You can't go to these people and say, hey, wait a minute, don't have a baby until you're married, don't marry when you're a teenager, and make sure you graduate from high school.
If you say that, you're practicing racism or bigotry, whoever the hell knows what.
But you can't say those things.
You can't say pay for it yourself.
No, you can't say that.
And the reason is what I was talking about yesterday.
The self-loathing crowd thinks that these people are in these circumstances because of the basic construction of America, which is capitalism, which creates haves and have nots.
And because the haves are powerful white people, they dictate that the have nots are poor and largely black.
And so that's just the architecture, and there's nothing we can do about it except change the system, i.e., we got to get rid of capitalism.
Because you see, whereas socialism never has really succeeded, it still holds the promise of equality for all.
Even though you have to ignore the thugs and dictators that rise to power via coup d'etat in order to uh uh insinuate socialism on people.
A la fidel, a la the Soviet leadership.
Wherever it's tried, whatever's going on, Caesar Chavez, not Caesar, what Hugo, Hugo Chavez, whatever is it doing, he's pulling a mugabi.
Right as we speak, Hugo Chavez is looting private property of the wealthy in Venezuela and taking it for the government to pass out ostensibly the basis of fairness.
And for this is being applauded.
You can't find any criticism of mugabi anywhere on the American left.
You won't find criticism of Castro on the American left.
You won't find criticism of any socialist thug because at least they're trying to make everybody equal.
Well, to the extent they succeed, everybody's equally miserable.
Equally in poverty.
But at least there aren't any haves except the elites.
Castro's doing okay, and Chavez is doing okay.
Gorbachev did okay, the Soviet leaders did okay, Mao did okay, Kim Il-Jung, whatever his name is of potbelly dictator or he's doing okay.
All these socialist thugs and dictators, oh, they do fine, and that's okay because they're the elites.
They're trying to make it fair and right for everybody.
But you can't go to the underclasses in America or anywhere else and say, hey, graduate from high school.
But don't get married.
Uh and don't have a baby before you get married, and don't have any more than two kids.
And if you don't do those things, the chances are you'll probably not end up in poverty.
You can't say that because they don't have the chance to not do those things because America consigns those things to those people by virtue of our structure, by virtue of capitalism.
Now to keep on here with George Will's piece.
In 1960, John Kennedy of Harvard and Palm Beach campaigned in West Virginia's primary.
And American liberalism experienced one of its regularly recurring rediscoveries of poor people, an epiphany abetted three years later by Michael Harrington's book, The Other America, reviving, or I'm sorry, receiving a 50-page review where liberals would notice it amid the New Yorker magazine's advertisements for luxury goods.
Between such rediscoveries of poverty and the poor, the poor are work for liberalism's constituencies among the caregiving professions.
Liberalism's post-Catrina fearlessness and discover is in discovering the obvious.
If an inner city is inundated, the victims would be disproportionately minorities, stopped short of indelicately noting how many of the victims were women with children but not husbands.
Because it was released during the post-Catrina debacle, scant attention was paid to the National Center for Health Statistics report.
We mentioned it here, that in 2003, 34.6% of all American births were to unmarried women.
The percentage among African American women was 68.2%.
Of course, one of the reasons for that is that during the war on poverty, the federal government, and its 6.6 trillion dollars, has taken the place of the father, of the breadwinner of the need for the father to be at home accepting the responsibility of his actions.
So, and again, the left, because they're trying to do something about it.
They say, well, don't judge our results.
Judge our intentions.
No, it's time to judge your results.
And New Orleans is the perfect way to judge your results.
That place ought to be a utopia.
That place should have been a panacea.
That place should have been someplace nobody wanted to leave, and everybody ought to be clamoring now to get back to, even after this flood and the hurricane.
But such is not the case.
So the real evidence here.
Yeah, you can look at Haley Barber and uh and and Jeb Bush and the other governors in these stricken areas is, oh, yeah, they're doing a great job, and the federal government wasn't needed all that much.
But at the same time, you have to say, well, why is the federal government just targeted New Orleans to be destroyed?
And sadly, some on the left think so.
But the truth is you had no competent leadership on the state or local level.
But you know something I've been wondering about.
So I've been meaning to mention this.
Mary Landry went to the floor of the U.S. Senate, and she's been on TV a lot lately.
She's been saying the forces of the Bush administration have been out there castigating local and state officials.
The what is she the term that she used, the Bush or the Republican uh attack machine or some such thing.
The Bush attack machine, the president's act has been castigating these local officials down in New Orleans and in Louisiana and blah, blah, blah.
And I'm thinking, I haven't heard one administration official cast any blame anywhere on local officials.
So who is it that she's talking about?
It finally dawned on me.
Me.
You know, it it she's dawning, uh, she she it's dawning on me that she's talking about me.
I'm part of the Bush attack machine.
And so is anybody else who has been pointing fingers at the local government and how incompetent it was.
Because Bush is not allowing that to be said from his administration.
So it apparently Mary Landrew and the rest of the crowd on her side think that all this is organized through Rove's office.
I guarantee you that's what they think.
Well, they couldn't be more wrong.
That is that assumption.
Their assumption that people on the right don't have minds of their own, can't see with their own two eyes, and if they do see with their own two eyes, they don't see what they think they see.
And so people like me who are pointing fingers say, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute.
What uh what happened about the competence of the Louisiana New Orleans?
Well, that can't be genuine.
That has to be sponsored, that has to be driven by some administration attack dog machine or what have you.
I assure you, Senator Landrew, it's not.
Uh I know I gotta take a break.
I'm way long here, folks.
You're listening to Rush Limbaugh on the excellence in podcasting network.
You know, folks, I really I gotta apologize to you again.
I got on a roll here in that last segment.
And when I get on a roll, I don't even want to stop for money.
And so I I I went through uh almost went through a scheduled commercial break.
We're gonna take another one here pretty soon.
And so this is not, it's not good.
It's not good to have commercials in a minute of programming and more spots and then a minute's programming.
And and uh that's what's happened here.
So I beg your indulgence here.
I beg your forgiveness on this.
I just I didn't want to break that up.
I uh I was watching the clock the whole time I did it.
Uh or I was in the midst of that uh brilliant monologue, but I didn't want to have to break it up and return to it and reset the stage, finish the rest of it.
So let me tell you what's good.
I'm taking full responsibility for screwing up the programming format.
Uh but it's not a mistake because I do what I do.
Whatever I do is what this show is.
There are no mistakes here.
And it what it's always worth it.
I just know that some people are going to think we're adding commercials here.
We haven't done that.
Uh we finally got the Biden pieces put together, the little fireworks that happened this morning.
We'll have those for you in the next hour.
And also a fascinating story from the Boston Globe today, debunking some of the myths that have been reported.
For example, uh sociologists are questioning just how much looting and mayhem really took place in New Orleans.
And it's stated in this piece, they can't find any evidence of any rapes that took place anywhere.
So I'll run it by you just uh so you and it's in the Boston Globe for those of you that may be doubting the source.
quick timeout, we will be right back, though.
Stay with us.
Fastest three hours in media rolling right along, two of them in the can, one more to go.
And we'll lead off the next hour with the uh Joe Biden questioning, the highlights of Biden questioning Judge Roberts.
Those hearings due to resume in about 15 minutes from now.