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Sept. 19, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:13
September 19, 2005, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
And greetings to you, thrill seekers and conversationalists and music lovers all across the fruited plane.
Hope you had a great weekend.
We are back, and we've got broadcast excellence straight ahead here from the one and only Excellence in Broadcasting Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
I am America's anchorman, firmly ensconced here.
In the prestigious Attila the Hun chair, if you want to be on the program today, telephone number is 800-282-2882, and the email address is rush at EIBnet.com.
Folks, let me first give you just a little bit of a heads up here.
I'm a little under the weather today.
My voice sounds okay, but it's a little weak.
I don't know if you can tell with the magic of audio compression whether or not I'm a little stuffy, but I am.
And I'll tell you this.
I came down with this, son.
I knew on Saturday morning I was coming down with this.
And I immediately, I went in there and I grabbed those Zycam swabs.
And I've been Zycamming my nostrils all weekend.
And if it weren't for that, I don't think I would be here today.
Honestly, I think this is going to be of a short duration, but nevertheless, it is what it is.
So, look, it's almost unbelievable out there today.
From Bill Clinton to the Emmys last night to Dan Rather getting standing ovation to Cindy Sheehan.
So, yeah, she's back.
She's saying that Hillary will soon renounce her support for the war.
She's just waiting for the right time.
They got Bill Clinton out there yesterday on Stephanopoulos.
There's just a lot to explain and a lot to do.
And we'll get to all of it as the program unfolds today.
Meanwhile, so much of what I have told you has come to pass.
I told you that New Orleans would come back a lot sooner than anybody thought.
I was right.
Told you that the death toll will be lower than anybody thought that was right.
I told you that the government, in fact, I urged the government to withdraw or rescind temporarily all these gasoline regulations that require 40 different gasoline formulations for the different parts of the country.
And I said, do that, make it permanent.
They didn't make it permanent, but now there's some moves on to do that finally.
Don't know if it'll happen, but it would be great.
But the gasoline prices come down, trickle up now because the arrival of Hurricane Rita van den Hoovel is now imminent.
Hurricane Rita van den Hoovel, according to the 11 a.m. National Hurricane Center forecast track, takes it pretty close to Key West.
Those of us here in the EIB Southern Commander, just north of the Hurricane Warning area, we've got tropical storm warnings.
And I think just a portion of where we are is covered by a Hurricane Watch.
But anyway, the key is now undergoing a mandatory evacuation.
One of the computer models, just one, only one of them takes the track of Hurricane Rita Vandenhoe back into New Orleans.
The others take it much further south or further west, actually, into Texas, anywhere from Corpus Christi on up to the Galveston area.
But that's real far out, and that cone's pretty white up there.
So it's unknown.
It's already tracking a little further north than they thought, Mr. Snerdley, which is why at 11 o'clock we got placed in some of the watch and warning areas.
But it's moving fast.
It's moving like at 12 miles an hour.
So that's one good thing about it.
It's not one of these three mile an hour lingerers.
So we are keeping a sharp eye on it.
As I say, well, there's one other thing, too.
You know, you cannot escape it, and I guess it's somewhat understandable.
There is pessimism all over the country now.
Pessimism abounds.
You've got the eager excitement of the left.
The left is dancing on the grave of George W. Bush all over the place.
And there are a few conservatives who are practically calling him dead meat.
And we may as well forget about him and try to do what we can do here to stanch the damage of the Bush administration.
Yes, there are conservatives that are saying this.
And I was really tempted today to open the program as one of those angry, pessimistic conservatives and just start just reeling off a bunch of all the failures here and not tell you for 20 minutes or so and then start taking phone calls, Rush, what's happening to you?
I couldn't do it.
I couldn't do it.
I thought about it.
Maybe if I were feeling 100%, I could have pulled it off.
But I just couldn't.
I didn't think I could pull it off believably so for enough time to make it work.
But believe me, it was tempting.
So as I say, that pretty much sets the table.
The Bill Clinton stuff, I don't know how many people are really surprised by it.
We have the audio sound bites of it.
I'm sort of bored with Bill Clinton, and I think I can tell you in two or three sentences what's going on here.
I think that the Clintons have realized that the future of the party is in their kook fringe.
And Clinton's decided to get on board with them.
Virtually everything Clinton had to say yesterday on the Stefanopoulos show is pretty much a rehash of what the kook fringe has been saying from Iraq on.
Doesn't matter what the policy is.
Clinton obviously lying about some things that didn't happen in the 90s that did and saying some things that didn't happen or did happen in the 90s didn't.
And we can parse it.
We can go through it.
We probably will today.
But it's all about two things.
It's all about reestablishing Clinton's legacy and it's all about setting the platform for Hillary to seek the presidency in 2008.
Clinton also said he thinks it'd be wise if she did not pledge to serve a full term as Senate.
But that, of course, what does a promise from a Clinton mean?
You know, what does it really matter what she says?
We know what she's going to do.
But the left is now, they've pretty much forgotten John Roberts.
They're now looking at the next Republican nominee that the president will name, the next judicial nominee.
And so are members of the right.
And so some members of the right are already to jump off the train, thinking Bush is going to sandbag them and nominate somebody like Gonzalez or Larry Thompson, a moderate.
And so it may be a lonely road here today, folks.
I may be the only one that has a smidgen of optimism for you as the program unfolds, but I can't help it.
It's the way I'm naturally inclined.
I'm not inspired by pessimism anyway, and I look at the Democrats not learning anything.
I look at the Democrats continuing to corkscrew themselves into the ground.
And I know that it may not appear that way to all of you, but give you one example.
I don't care whether it's a Boston Globe today or the L.A. Times or any news organization.
Whatever the story is, the media analyzes it from two vantage points.
One is, how will this help the Democrats?
And two, how will it hurt Bush?
They're looking at the vote on John Roberts now.
And I told you this on Friday, purely as a politically strategic move.
How many Democrats ought to vote for the guy?
What is it going to say about their vote for the next nominee?
There's no not even any inkling of substance to these people on the left and their criticism.
It's all being done within the context, as it always has been since January of 2001.
How can we hurt Bush?
How will this hurt Bush and how will this help the Democrats?
So you understand now that this cycle that has been underway for five years now is still in full-fledged, full speed ahead mode.
And you have to understand that when watching the news and interpreting it and so forth.
The effort here that we'll undertake today to set some of this straight will be our usual effort.
We're going to take quick timeout.
We come back.
I will start with some audio soundbites from the president from last Friday talking about the spending and all of this that has so many people upset about rebuilding New Orleans.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back and continue here in just a moment.
And we're back.
Telephone numbers 1-800-282-2882.
If you'd like to be on the program today, let's go to the audio soundbites.
Last Friday, this is a press conference with the joint press conference with Vladimir Putin.
Unidentified reporters said, with billions of dollars flowing out of Washington for hurricane relief, some Republicans are worried that you're writing a blank check that will have to be paid by future generations.
Who is going to have to pay for this recovery, sir?
To get cost money.
But I'm confident we can handle it, and I'm confident we can handle our other priorities.
It's going to mean that we're going to have to make sure we cut unnecessary spending.
It's going to mean we've got to maintain economic growth, and therefore we should not raise taxes.
Our working people have had to pay a tax in essence by higher gasoline prices.
And we don't need to be taking more money out of their pocket.
And the president continued with this.
So there's a big role for the federal government.
There's a big role for private sector, and that's why I call for economic growth zones, economic enterprise zone.
Look, there's not going to be any revenues coming out of that area for a while anyway.
So we might as well give them good tax relief in order to get jobs there and investment there.
It makes sense.
The entrepreneurial spirit is what's going to help lift this part of the world up.
That's what the president says.
There's a lot of people, and you may be one of them, that are terribly upset about all this money being spent.
And I mentioned last week on the program, Thursday or Friday, don't remember which, that this is actually required by statute.
And a lot of people said, well, what statute?
It's easy for you to say, what statute?
The statute's the Stafford Act, folks.
And I don't want to go into a lot of minutiae here, but the Stafford Act dates back to 1988, the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act.
It's 42 United States Code, sections 5121 to 5206.
And it is triggered by a major disaster declaration like Hurricane Katrina.
It means that the federal share is required to be at least 75% of the reconstruction costs for public infrastructure, which of course is a huge part of the total costs.
And when you have extraordinary circumstances like Hurricane Hugo and Hurricane Andrew and the Oklahoma City bombing, the terrorist attacks in 9-11, presidents have approved up to 100% of the federal share.
So there is a statutory requirement to this that undergirds all this.
Now, this is not to say that the president's not eager to spend the money.
But as we talked about last week, I put forth a plan, the Limbaugh Plan.
We put that plan at rushlimbaugh.com.
We asked all of you to send in your ideas.
Well, those of you who are subscribers at Rush 24-7, because that's where the super secret email address that accesses Coco, the webmaster, so he can read the emails.
And we put some up there.
And there's some good ideas into the ones that I have put forward.
And in addition, folks, I have to tell you, some Republican congressmen are coming forth, congresspersons are coming forth with similar ideas.
In fact, there was even this phone call on C-SPAN happened Saturday morning.
Steve Scully, no, I'm sorry, I don't know who the host was.
The call is Victor from Silver Springs, Maryland.
Heard a really great plan yesterday.
It's called the Limbaugh plan and what it is is, you rewrite the highway bill, the Energy bill and all the other bills, get all the pork out of it and then you make sure the money does not go to the liberals who ruined things in the first place, especially down in Louisiana where the liberals have ran things for 60 years.
It's just a poll failure and everybody can see how liberalism has failed miserably.
Now, I didn't see this myself uh, cookie was watching it.
But but uh, she tells me that the host had no comment.
Uh whoever, whoever you can imagine the C-span host sitting there a caller calls in suggesting a Limbaugh plan.
Uh, but there was no comment to this.
But it it does.
It does make all the sense in the world and in fact in the uh, in the stack of stuff.
Uh, I have all kinds of documentation furthering the concept here that the disaster down there, contrary to what Bill Clinton wants to say, was actually brought on by the incompetence of local and state officials.
And, by the way, people are saying, well hey, let's join hands did.
By the way, did you notice for a time, until Clinton appeared, sunday now, this was fascinating uh, to me.
Uh, there was a.
There was a poll that came out, a FOX NEWS Opinion Dynamic poll that came out saturday.
Let me give you the progression of events.
In the first, on saturday morning, I see Donna Brazile with an op-ed piece in the Washington POST and basically she uh, she is praising the president's speech on thursday night greatest speech.
She wants to help him.
She's from New Orleans, she wants to help him.
She's registering for the army, she wants to get in there, get her hands dirty and help him, put that place back together.
And i'm saying whoa whoa, what is this?
Well, it has to be damage control, has to be a damage control op-ed based on the ABC show.
Thursday night, following the president's speech, where all those New Orleans residents outside the Astrodome praised the speech.
And then later in the day on saturday, i'm seeing, i'm seeing uh Dingy, Harry and and some of the other Democrats talk.
Well, we need to, we need to put the partisanship aside here and we need to get together, work with this.
Uh, stop pointing fingers.
Whoa, what's?
What's going on?
I'm thinking there's got to be a poll coming somewhere.
There has to be a poll coming that shows uh, that that the Democrats are losing big by by pointing fingers of blame at Bush and that they're not in touch with the actual people who live in the Astrodome.
Escape from New Orleans and a light went off.
You know, those people haven't seen the coverage.
Those people haven't seen the coverage those people have from the time they left New Orleans to the time they got into the to the Superdome, then moved over to the Astrodome wherever else they are.
They haven't seen all this coverage bashing Bush.
And so you've got you've got really some honest opinions from people on that A BC show thursday night, before they had been touched by media coverage.
Then the Brazil piece comes and then all these Democrats start talking about how we need to uh, you know, stop working together, to uh uh, put this back together.
And I said there's got to be a poll coming.
They have to have head heads up on a poll that shows that most people are not down on Bush for the way they've handled this.
And lo and behold, a Fox News opinion dynamics poll on Saturday night pretty much showed that I don't have this poll in front of me.
But then that all was cast aside when Bill Clinton went on Stephanopoulos on Sunday.
And when Clinton went on Stephanopoulos, he turned it all back on Bush.
And I don't know what the result is going to be with the rest of the Democratic Party on this, but it is clear to me that who is running the Democratic Party is the Kook Fringe.
They're the ones that are raising the money.
They're the ones that having secret meetings with Hillary.
She's talking to these Kook Fringe bloggers and so forth on the left.
And so I suspect that there's an undercurrent out there nationally that is not at all, and I'm not surprised by this, not at all represented by the coverage of the mainstream press.
I'm talking about a public opinion and a public attitude.
And I also noticed the New York Times here today in an editorial.
You won't believe this is the New York Times until a singular fact is pointed out to you.
The New York Times is ripping news coverage of the hurricane aftermath.
Disaster has a way of bringing out the best and the worst instincts in the news media.
It's a grand thing that during the most terrible days of Hurricane Katrina, many reporters found their gag reflex and stopped swallowing pat excuses from public officials.
But the media's willingness to report thinly attributed rumors may also have contributed to a kind of cultural wreckage that will not clean up easily.
At first, anyone with any knowledge of the events in New Orleans knows that terrible things with non-natural causes occurred.
There were assaults, shots fired at rescue helicopters, given the state of the city's police department, many other crimes that probably went unreported.
But many instances in the lurid libretto of widespread murder, carjacking, rape, and assaults that filled the airwaves and newspapers have yet to be established or proved as far as anybody can determine.
And many of the urban legends that sprang up, the systematic rape of children, the slitting of a seven-year-old's throat, so far seem to be just that, rumors.
The fact that some of these rumors were peated by overwhelmed local officials does not completely get the news media off the hook.
A survey of news reports in the LexisNexis database shows that on September 1st, the news media's narrative of the hurricane shifted.
And then the Times quotes television reports.
It goes on to quote television reports.
And it makes the case here that the news reports were far worse than anything that actually happened.
And the Times is simply taking an opportunity here to point fingers of blame at television journalists.
If you know the undercurrents of journalism, you know that there's always been a rivalry and a bit of jealousy on the part of print people for television people, except for the print people that are also broadcast people.
You have a lot of print people also do TV and or radio.
But for those that are strictly print, they look at television journalists as, you know, pretenders, non-professionals.
They look at a lot of them the way they look at Fox.
And in fact, John Gibson is the first television anchor quoted in this New York Times piece in which they attempt to explain that there was so much exaggeration going, so much misreporting going on, so many mistakes being made.
But here it is right here.
I don't have time to read the whole thing to you, but we will link to it at rushlimbaugh.com later today so you can find it.
If you want to go to the New York Times website, you can yourself.
So a quick time out, got to go a break coming up.
We'll be back and continue in mere moments on this, the EIB network.
Stay with us.
You're listening to Rush Limbaugh on the Excellence in Podcasting Network.
Half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it fair.
El Rushball behind the golden EIB microphone at the prestigious Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
This is Carl in San Diego.
Hello, sir.
I'm glad you called.
All right, Rush.
How are you doing?
I appreciate all you've done.
Thank you, sir, very much.
Pretty well.
Not bad.
Well, it really has been great.
Yes, I'm reading my North County Times, and I'm quoting an AP release that says in 1997 that the Clinton administration ignored the plans for evacuation in the New Orleans area.
It starts out with 1997 when Congress set aside $500,000 to create a comprehensive analysis and plan for evacuation.
Look, let me go through.
You're absolutely right.
We're also hearing all kinds of things.
Not just that, but there were some Louisiana officials under indictment for misappropriating funds and not using them as they were intended.
And we've even, folks, we've got some news out there today that some of these local and state officials were actually taking some of the goods that were sent, not money, but the like clothes and so forth that were sent down there for the victims.
They're taking first dibs for themselves.
You know, it's classic.
I tell you, if the more this goes on and the more that ends up being reported about this, you're going to find that the greatest, oh, what should I say?
The most egregious incompetence will have occurred at the local and the state level.
Now, here's the story that Carl is talking about.
And you can sum it up really this simply.
If FEMA was working properly during the Clinton co-presidency, then New Orleans wouldn't be in the mess that it is today.
The truth is that it was a Republican Congress that foresaw the problem and directed funds to Bill and Hillary's FEMA that should have averted the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina Vandenhoe.
But that didn't happen.
As far back as eight years ago, Congress ordered FEMA to develop a plan for evacuating New Orleans during a massive hurricane, but the money instead went to studying the causeway bridge that spans the city's Link Potcha train.
The outcome provides just one more example of the government's failure to prepare for a massive but foreseeable catastrophe.
And this according to the lawmaker who helped secure the money for FEMA to develop the plan, that would be former Representative Billy Tozin, a Republican from Louisiana.
He said they never used that money for the intended purpose.
The whole intent was to give them resources so they could plan an evacuation of New Orleans and anticipated that a very large number of people would never leave.
That possibility was one of the concerns that led Congress in 1997 to set aside a half million dollars for FEMA to create a comprehensive analysis and plan of all evacuation alternatives for the New Orleans metro area.
Frustrated two years later that nothing had materialized, Congress strengthened its directive.
This time it ordered an evacuation plan for a Category 3 or greater storm, a levee break, a flood, or other natural disaster for the New Orleans area.
The $500,000 that Congress appropriated for the plan went to a commission that studied future options for the 24-mile causeway over Lake Poncha Train, according to FEMA spokesman Butch Kinnerney.
The hefty report produced by the Greater New Orleans Expressway Commission primarily was not about evacuation.
In general, it was an overview of all the things that we need to do for the causeway through 2016.
Billy Tozen said, none of us could find where the money went.
They gave it to the Causeway Commission.
I mean, that's absolutely wacky.
And here you have one of the reasons, and this is just one of a countless number of reasons why, folks, there is such concern from a lot of quarters at just throwing a bunch of money at places, particularly these people.
And I will gladly concede that there is a tremendous opportunity here.
As I said on Friday, I think part of what George Bush was saying in his speech Thursday night, if you read between the lines, was, all right, we've tried it your way for 60 years.
Now we're going to try it ours.
And I tell you, we're going to have to push that throughout this whole period because the temptation when large piles of money are thrown at people is to take it, steal it, deciphen it,
to use it for somebody else's pet causes or concerns rather than for where it's intended, which is why it's hopeful or it's hoped for by me that the vast majority of this stuff that's earmarked actually gets as near to the end users as possible.
But the stories that come out of this state just continue to pile up.
In a Los Angeles Times story that ran over the weekend on Saturday, senior officials in Louisiana's emergency planning agency already were awaiting trial over allegations stemming from a federal investigation into waste management and missing funds when Hurricane Katrina van den Hoovel struck.
Federal auditors are still trying to track as much as $60 million in unaccounted-for funds that were funneled to the state from FEMA dating back to 1998.
All of this goes back to the Clinton years.
When you backtrack it, it all goes back to the Clinton years, which I'll tell you another thing.
One of the reasons that Clinton went on Stephanopoulos Sunday, there's a reason he went on Stephanopoulos.
He knows Stephanopoulos is going to let him talk.
Stephanopoulos is going to let him have diarrhea of the mouth.
Stephanopoulos wants to get back on Clinton's good side after writing a book about him when he left that administration that was not all that flattering.
So, you know, Stephanopoulos is not going to stand up to him.
So he just gets to rewrite history just as he did after 9-11.
The whole purpose of the Clinton administration after 9-11 was to deflect any aim at their administration and put it on the Bush administration.
Same thing is happening here, folks.
It's identical.
Self-preservation.
An administration that is still in search of a legacy because the only legacy they really have is one of oral sex in the Oval Office utilizing cigars and interns.
That's the legacy they've got.
They're trying to rebuild a legacy.
That's what this Clinton Global Initiative is all about, that and sponsoring Hillary's presidential bid.
And now Clinton's out there knowing full well that none of what he had access to back in the 90s dealt with the potential threats of either terrorism or natural disasters.
He knows it as well as anybody does.
So he has a friendly media and he has a willing bunch of accomplices throughout all the other networks and newspapers to help rewrite history now to try to blame this on the current federal government.
What is the news media's new favorite word right now?
Federal, isn't it?
Do you not hear the word federal used more often than any other word they're using?
Federal here, federal there, federal that.
The effort, the news cycle still exists.
It's all George Bush's fault.
How's this going to hurt Bush?
How can we make it hurt Bush?
That is the sole focus of everybody in the mainstream press today, it seems.
Excuse me.
As I say, folks, if you just joined me on Under the Weather Today, doing my best to struggle through.
And were it not for the cough, I doubt that you would have even known, unless you were here at the top of the program where I mentioned it, just to cover my basis.
But the fact remains here that it ought not be too difficult dealing with this because the left presents us no new challenge.
They're rewriting history.
They are looking at every news story through the prism of that one news cycle.
They're just living in that moment.
And it's all about how does this hurt Bush?
How does this help Bush?
By the way, have you heard about the Rasmussen poll?
The Rasmussen poll was the most accurate presidential poll in 2004.
And the Rasmussen poll has consistently had Bush's approval numbers at 48%.
He hasn't dipped below 48%, I don't believe, in the Rasmussen poll.
Have you seen that poll reported anywhere in the media?
No, you haven't, and you won't.
Now, if the Rasmussen poll had been bad for Bush, you would have heard about it, but it's not.
Now they're even complaining, some of the Democrats even complaining that they used generators to light up the church behind Bush on Thursday night in the speech, that it was artificial and that it portrayed a vision of New Orleans that wasn't genuine.
And as usual, the White House not responding to any of this.
It's their policy, obviously.
They just keep going.
And they know they've got defenders out there.
And they know that the, I think they're also confident that it's so obvious what the left and the media are doing that it really doesn't gain a whole lot of traction.
But it's just laughable here to look at all of this that was done.
We haven't even talked about what the environmentalists did damage-wise to that region that set this region up for flooding, which is really what happened here.
A flood occurred.
The hurricane went through there.
It really didn't do much of the damage you see on TV.
It was the flooding that occurred long after the hurricane had gone through and had passed that created the scenes on television that we saw.
And you find that so much thought went into this back in the 90s, and you saw that so much money was spent on this back in the 90s.
And you see that all the money that was sent down there was not used for the purposes for which it was intended.
And then we hear Clinton on TV Sunday decrying, really coming out with the Kook Fringe Liberal Playbook, folks, reciting word after word after word from the Kuk Fringe Liberal Playbook on what all went wrong.
And this is not to mention, but I find it interesting, too, that so many of the reporters talking about this, you know, it must really be bad out there because ex-presidents don't do this.
Ex-presidents don't criticize the current occupant.
Don't break my leg.
What do you mean this is the first time?
Bill Clinton's been doing this since 2001 for crying out loud.
How many times did Bill Clinton go to Europe during our debates before the Security Council of the United Nations and try to sandbag our policy with his European socialist buddies?
How many times did he go across the pond and make such speeches critical of this administration?
It's been countless times.
This is by no means the first time Clinton has done this.
It's really unusual to see a former president break with the current president during the current president's turn, blah, blah.
It may have been, but it's not anymore.
Not since Bill Clinton became an ex-president.
Quick time out.
We'll be back after this.
Stay with us.
Okay, back to the audio soundbites.
The discussion, roundtable discussion on this week with Stephanopoulos yesterday featured Sam Donaldson.
They went back to the major leagues, ladies and gentlemen, for some commentators of the roundtable and listen to this.
I mean, listen, I was watching on ABC on Thursday night.
Some of the victims we collected in Houston loved it.
They loved every single word.
You hear Frank Rich and Maureen down in the New York Times completely panned it.
And the president was not surprising there.
And it sparked this debate we just saw about how to pay for it.
I just wondered, what's your take?
Well, if I were a victim, I'd love it too.
If you say to me, anything you want, anything it takes, without a plan, maybe this doesn't make sense, but no, we'll just do it.
And that's what the president said.
I would just think that was wonderful.
Now, if I had to pay for it, that's another thing.
Sam's going conservative in his old age here, folks.
I wonder if he realizes how much like pessimistic conservatives he sounds there.
Well, he does.
I mean, Mr. Sturdley, well, I'd love it too.
Anything you want without a plan?
Maybe it just doesn't make sense.
Oh, we'll just do it.
Sam, he's not talking about tax cuts here.
He's talking about your precious federal spending.
You ought to be embracing this, you hypocrite.
Crying out loud, folks.
It's amazing to watch these people right before our very eyes turn into absolute fools and idiots.
Brian in Louisville, Kentucky.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Hello.
Hey, Rush.
Tell me what you think about Mayor Ray Nagan acting like he knows everything now and telling everybody can come back and live there and start a business again when every federal official and expert is telling them not to.
Well, the way I must tell you, and this may be because of my illness today, that I am really, I'm a trooper today, folks, fighting through this little fever today.
But I know, yeah, play it, play and hurt.
I was doubtful this morning, but I showed up.
And when I first saw this story, it said Mayor Nagan to repopulate New Orleans.
And I said, wow, who are the lucky women?
And then I said, wait, that can't be what he's talking about.
So now I figured that he wants to bring people back early.
And the federal government, you're right, is saying this is not the time.
The water is not drinkable yet and so forth.
But here's what the president, by the way, this morning said about this.
He had a cabinet meeting, and an unidentified reporter said, Mayor Nagan has invited the people to start returning to the city a lot of federal officials who feel it's not safe to do.
You feel like you need to step in, sir.
We share the goal of the mayor, but we have got concerns.
There are environmental concerns, which Administrator Johnson shared with us today.
Let me give you a real concern that I think everybody ought to pay attention to, and that is this tropical storm Rita, which now looks like it's going to head out into the Gulf and could track Katrina or it could head further to the west.
But nevertheless, there is deep concern about this storm causing more flooding in New Orleans.
And so Admiral Allen has reflected the concerns of this administration.
And we want to work with the mayor.
The mayor is working hard.
He's got this dream about having his city up and running.
And we share that dream.
But we also want to be realistic about some of the hurdles and obstacles.
For my part, I understand the mayor's desire to get people back in there.
I predicted this, folks.
I told you it wasn't going to be six months.
I told you.
We ought to go back and get all my predictions on the Monday before the levees even broke.
Then the Tuesday after the levees broke.
Why don't we go get my predictions and let you listen to them and see how many of them have come true and how many of them are in the process of coming true about how fast this place should be rebuilt, about how bad it was not going to be, about how fast they'd get the water drained out of there, about how quickly they would want to get back to normal.
And that's all the mayor is saying.
He just simply wants to return to normalcy for himself and for his people.
I also think they want to get as many people back there as possible for the elections coming up in 2006.
We'll be right back.
Stay with us, folks.
We have time to squeeze in another phone call here.
Let's go to Melbourne, Florida.
This is Sean.
Hello, sir, and welcome.
Hey, Rush.
Hope you feel better later on today.
Real quick, I agree with you reading between the lines and what you've been saying about spending some money and getting rid of this liberalism.
So I got two questions on this.
One, do you think that after this is all said and done, is the Bush administration actually going to get credit for the work that they've done in reshaping and rebuilding?
And at the end of it all, do you think that the people, not the people like us who listen to you and understand the fraudulent media, will they finally understand that they've been getting the high-hard one for the last 60 years?
That's a toughie.
I mean, I don't profess to know whether that's going to be the case because I don't really know yet how all this is going to unfold.
What I know is the opportunity we have.
Now, if the opportunity that we have to demonstrate conservatism in rebuilding this area of the country is utilized to the max, then the conclusion will be inescapable.
The differences will be inescapable.
I mean, the people who have lived in the abject poverty of that region for all these many generations will not be able to help but notice the difference if it's done the right way.
And that remains a big if.
But folks, the people of this country are the ones that make things happen.
And it's going to take a lot of pressure.
It's going to take a lot of focus and interest to make sure that this plan is put together with a primarily conservative foundation.
if that does happen.
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