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Sept. 20, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:43
September 20, 2005, Tuesday, Hour #2
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Time Text
All right, Bran, you remember Turnadino Cam on?
All right.
All right.
I only had to say it once this time.
Hubba Hubba Hubba.
Mr. Snerdley, are you okay in there?
I haven't seen you crack a smile yet today.
What's funny?
Greetings, my friends.
Welcome back.
Great to have you.
Rush Limbaugh here, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Telephone numbers 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program.
Mr. Snerdley needs a laugh, and maybe you do too, so try this.
Try this.
Former CBS News reporter Dan Rather said yesterday that there is a climate of fear.
A climate of fear running through newsrooms, stronger than he has ever seen in his more than four-decade career.
As you know, rather uh uh famously tangled with President Nixon and his aides during Watergate.
Uh years uh that though that Rather was a hard charging White House correspondent.
Now, keep that in mind because that, folks, is key to understanding why uh why Dan Blather is uh is upset.
He was reduced to tears.
He was reduced to tears, addressing the Fordham University Scrule of Law in Manhattan, occasionally forcing back tears.
He said that in the intervening years, politicians of every persuasion had gotten better at applying pressure on the conglomerates that own the broadcast networks.
He called it a new journalism order.
What is it about Dan and Tears?
He's he's he's crying a lot more these days.
I'm wondering if if Dan got shot one day that we don't know about it, and it uh fragments still remain in the brain.
Uh that might explain all this.
Uh Dan said that the the pressure, this this new pressure uh that's brought to bear uh on the uh on the uh uh uh uh uh newsrooms by corporate conglomerates.
Uh uh is is something that is is new and it's very, very troublesome.
And he was accompanied by an HBO documentary and uh and family person, the President Sheila Nevins, both of whom were due to receive lifetime achievement awards at the News and Documentary Emmy Awards on Monday night.
Nevin said that even in the documentary world there's a certain kind of intimidation brought to bear these days, particularly from the religious right.
She said that if you made a movie about Charles Darwin now, it would be revolutionary.
If we did a documentary on Darwin, I'd get a thousand hate emails.
Nevin asked Rather if he felt the same type of pressure forces uh in the Nixon administration as in the current Bush administration.
He said, No, I don't.
That's not to say there weren't forces trying to remove him from the White House meat while Watergate was going on, but rather said uh that he felt supported by everybody above him, from Washington Bureau Chief Bill Small to then News President Dick Salant and the CBS chief William Paley.
He says there was a connection between the leadership and the lead, a sense of we're in this together.
It's not that the then leadership of CBS wasn't interested in shareholder value and profits, rather said.
They also saw news as a public service.
Rather said he knew very little of the intense pressure to remove him early in the 70s because of his boss's support.
Now the HBO documentarian took up for the cause and rather, who was emotional several times during the event.
Uh she said, when a man is close to tears discussing his work, and his lip quivers, he deserves bosses who punch back.
I feel I would punch back for Dan.
Rather went on to praise the coverage of Hurricane Katrina by the new generation of TV journalists and acknowledged that he would have loved to have reported from the Gulf Coast, but the dry cleaners couldn't find his trench coat in time.
Is it governing uh covering hurricanes is something I know something about?
He said.
It's been one of TV News' finest moments.
Yeah, been one of it's it's you know, it's just like Dan, it's just like Watergate.
All of you guys, the Washington Post, and everybody told us, look back at Watergate.
That was our finest hour.
All right, we'll judge you on the basis of your finest hour.
It was not your finest hour at all.
Now they think that the way they've covered this hurricane is their finest hour.
Go look at all the doom and gloom they predicted.
Go look at all the body count totals that they predicted.
Go look at all the utter devastation they predicted.
Go look at all of it.
Look at the criticism of the federal government.
Look at George W. Bush.
And then ask yourself to compare what they said with what the current reality is, and you'll find there isn't much in common.
Of course, do we have to even mention the forged documents?
Those big nasty conglomerates don't like having to defend forged documents, fake news stories, and outright lies too much.
But here's the difference.
Here's the difference, and this is just confirming something that I have I have warned you people about, I have told you about for years now.
He is simply upset because there is more competition than ever before.
There's more television stations, there's more radio shows.
See, he got away with this in the past.
He got away with what he didn't get away with in the forged documents.
He unleashed all that stuff against Nixon and he got away with it then because it's not that his bosses stood behind him.
It's that there was nobody around to challenge what the mainstream press was doing then.
Nobody with a very loud voice.
So they it they had their monopoly in those days and they were able to do and get away with whatever they wanted to do.
There was no other viewpoint.
Now they don't get away with it.
There's a magnifying glass on what these people do.
How do we know this is the first time they faked sources, faked documents?
How do we know this is the first time?
In the words of one of my all-time favorite philosophers, Pascal in the Ponsei.
Pascal said it's much easier to believe that something has been can be again than to believe that something never has been can be.
That's a paraphrase, but that's how I recall it.
Well, okay, we know CBS forged some documents.
Easy to believe it just happened for the first time.
Or is it easier to believe that something's happened?
It's happened before.
Will happen again.
How do we know we don't know?
Well, we were all we've all been suspicious for decades.
We've had all this talk about unidentified sources, anonymous sources, now that's changing.
It's all changing for the good, but it's putting crimps in the agenda of people like Dan Rather.
It's putting crimps in their ability.
Now, this business, I also think when he's when he talks about, well, there was a connection between the lead and the leadership.
You know all that is?
That's just rather remembers the good old days when Bill Paley ran CBS and he and he and Paley were buddies.
He was part of the big click back then.
This business about Paley looking at news as a public service.
Go back in those days and you tell me how much money CBS News lost.
And I'll guarantee you it wasn't a dime.
CBS News wasn't losing money under Paley.
He wasn't about losing money.
And if they showed it losing money, it was an accounting trick to make it look like they were in public service.
He wasn't about none of these guys have ever been about losing money.
They've all been about showing a profit.
When Laurie Lawrence Tush, Larry Tish rather, took over for the uh bought CBS from whoever he bought it from, first thing he did was look at the bottom line, said, My God, my my news division here is in chief.
He laid off 200 people, rather cried about that.
And he demanded exemption from the bottom line back then because news was a public service.
This holier than now attitude that these people have always possessed, that without them, we would not exist.
Without them, the Constitution would have fallen, the country would have fallen.
And uh, as we all know, it's just the exact opposite.
It's without our soldiers, we would have fallen.
The same soldiers that people like Rather and the rest of the mainstream press seek to criticize and impugn on a regular basis when they are deployed by a Republican president.
But you know, folks, it's it's a uh a classic example.
I I think I think I think uh rather is beginning to remind me a little bit of Clinton, the same denial of reality, always focused on himself, incapable of being honest.
It's narcissism.
I was out in LA not long ago, had dinner with a bunch of people, and the subject of Bill Clinton came up uh in an unrelated way, and I finally asked one of these Hollywood guys, would you explain something to me?
Would you explain to me why it is that all of these Hollywood hotshots and heavyweights are so in love with this hick from Arkansas President Bill Clinton?
He said, you know, people ask me that all the time, and they make the mistake assuming it's all because they're liberal.
He says, That's a part of it.
That's not what it is.
Clinton's one of these guys.
They're all narcissists.
They all think the world revolves around them.
They are the only people that count.
Everybody they think is thinking about them all the time.
Clinton's one of these guys.
So he welcomed them into the White House club and bamboo.
That's all it takes.
Whether he's a liberal or not really doesn't matter.
It helps, but they're all a bunch of narcissists.
Well, I seems to me the same thing's happening to Dan Rather.
He is living in utter denial of what happened here to end his career.
And in the process, he can't be honest about it.
Now he has to run around and criticize everybody else for the mistakes that happened on his watch.
And is that not typical and exactly what Bill Clinton is doing to this day?
Blaming everybody else for things that happened on his watch.
Is that not what the Liberal Democrats are doing themselves as a party?
Are they not running around blaming everybody else for the problems they have caused themselves?
It is pure narcissism, it is denial, and it is a lack of ability to be honest.
And it's it's overcome the entire mainstream media.
Well, the entire, it's a great percentage of it.
And Rather is just bemoaning the loss of his monopolistic power.
He's bemoaning the fact that back in the Watergate days, he could get away with all this kind of stuff and be called a hero.
He can still be called a hero today by the same people who thought he was a hero then.
And he can still be honored by the same kind of people who think he's a hero even after he is disgraced.
So he's allowed to live in the lie.
He's allowed to believe that somebody else did him in, partisan political forces, or whatever else he wants to refer to the people who finally turned up the facts about these forged memos and everything else about this story.
And by the way, it looks to me like CBS, they hung with him as long as they could.
Any other business, something like that happens, they fire you and ask questions later.
They did everything they could to hold on to rather and to protect his reputation in the midst of all this.
Fired everybody else but him.
Everybody else was made to fall on the sword.
So you have a classic case here of pure narcissism, utter denial of reality, lack of honesty.
It's the whole, the the whole, seems like the whole period of the of the Clinton era has infected the entire American left.
And I've told you this for the longest time.
It's the worst thing could have happened to them, and they think it's the best.
They think the best thing that ever happened to them was Bill Clinton.
The worst thing that ever happened to them was Bill Clinton, and now all of them are trying to be him.
And relive those glory days.
If you noticed with the left, it's always about reliving the glory days, either Vietnam or Watergate or Clinton.
When it comes to looking forward, even in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, can't do it.
Still have to talk about blame, still have to talk about Bush now engaging in ideological experimentation.
Well, the fact is we've undergone 60, 70 years of ideological failure on part of the left, and it's time to change course.
And we've been in the process of this for a number of years, and it's not time to go all wobbly in weak need here, folks.
The boat still needs to change direction, and we're in the process of turning it around.
Dan Rather's tears indicate our success.
Don't be fooled by anything else.
Quick timeout, back with more in just a sec.
So I asked Mr. Snerdley, what he what are you in such a foul mood about today?
He wasn't even smiling much during this Dan Rather story.
Just tired of carping.
I got up today and I read this story about Carrie and Edwards carping on Bush.
And you turn on the news networks.
It's three weeks since a hurricane.
They're still carping about the hurricane.
And I said, Yeah.
Duh.
We had six weeks of Cindy Sheehan.
We got three more weeks of this at least.
This is just the new shee-han.
It's all it is, folks.
It's this it's this, it never changes.
You must never forget what I have been trying to drill into your heads, and that is there is a news cycle at work.
It's been in effect for five years.
The news cycle is how can we damage the Bush presidency?
How can we destroy it?
And then in that cycle, every story comes up.
How will this hurt Bush?
How can we make this hurt Bush?
How will this help Bush?
So we make sure it doesn't help Bush.
Like Bush went to Mississippi today.
He's back down to the region.
Air Force One landing somewhere in Mississippi.
CNN graphic, damage control.
It's just that it's what it is, folks.
Damage couldn't.
Bush's not going down there because he cares.
Bush didn't go in down there because he wants to fix things.
Bush isn't going down for any other reason.
Damage control and spin control to protect and maybe resurrect hisari poll numbers and failing in it.
It's like we had a great caller in the last hour, Alvin from Atlanta called up and say, hey, you know, can we all he was stop picking on Ray Nagan, stop picking everybody else?
Can we all look forward?
There's one guy doing that, George W. Bush.
There's one guy not carping.
There's one guy not pointing fingers at blame.
There's one guy who is not looking back, and that's George W. Bush.
And guess who is receiving most of the criticism?
From a bunch of people who aren't doing diddly squat and who aren't even down there.
John Kerry and John Edwards aren't down there.
Oh, yeah, Edwards comes up.
He's got this new poverty center.
I guess he doesn't want to forget his roots, so we can go out and talk about two Americas and be genuine about it.
He's out there carping about poverty in America and how this episode shows that we have not dealt with our poverty.
No, Senator, it shows how you haven't dealt with it.
It shows how your party hasn't dealt with it.
It shows more than that how your party has promoted it, has exacerbated it, has promulgated it.
Your party's been running the show down there.
There's not much of America on display down there except that it's in America.
But what's on display down there is the failure of liberalism.
It's plain and simple.
It screams from the flooded rooftops.
It is so obvious to anybody with a half-objective eye.
But I don't see John Kerry down there distributing things.
I don't see John Edwards down there.
Carrie's wiping squid off of his face while Bush is making the speech, and then Kerry comes out with a statement about how horrible the speech is.
He didn't even watch it.
John Squid Carey.
Ray Schoolbus Nagan.
Oh, yeah, the backbone of America, folks.
Americans liberalism.
Yes, we can count on them.
They it's what I just told you.
They cannot look forward.
Everything's looking back.
We can't fix Social Security.
It's FDR's legacy.
We can't do anything about public schools.
We can't have vouchers.
No, the teachers' union, we got to maintain the public schools in dilapidated states.
Some of them are in, even now, particularly the ones the poor attend.
Because we got to keep those people dependent because we got to keep our welfare state alive.
We got to look at Iraq as Vietnam.
We got to look at Bush is Nixon.
Liberals want to look back.
Dan Radder wants to go back to Watergate in the old days where he had no competition, other than Jennings and Rather or whoever else it was, or Jennings and Brokaw, whoever else it was.
Just can't deal with the fact that life has gone on.
Life has moved forward.
None of the left is looking looking forward at all.
One guy is, and he's under the gun.
Here's Ben in Shreeport, Louisiana.
Hello, sir.
It's great to have you on the program.
Thank you.
Thank you for taking my call.
You know, I I was listening last hour with regard to uh some of the comments being made about Ray Nagan.
And uh as a New Orleans resident, uh, I think there are many things that he could have done better to prepare, and I think that they're just playing the political game down there.
There's no uh there's no doubt about that.
He and Blanco have really bought some things.
However, that being said, I I think it's being a little rough on him uh, you know, to to get on him for saying, come back to the city, and then three days later he says, no, get out of the city with regard to Rita, which could potentially and probably will make an impact.
I mean, as a resident, the one thing that I want is to get back in and to salvage anything that I might have left.
I've been living out of a suitcase since August 27th, you know.
Wait a minute.
You don't have anything left.
The media has told me nothing's left, it's all gone, it's all destroyed.
Well, and that very well may be, but you know, the issue is is that I'm there are people down there who do have things.
We as residents would like to go see that.
I don't blame Nagan for wanting to get a city back up, given that never in our history has a city this size been so devastated on American soil.
I mean, we hear about tsunamis and stuff over around the world, but when has this ever happened to us?
So we're coming down hard on him for.
Well, now wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Hurricane Camille, uh the Galveston hurricane of uh of 1902.
Yeah, but you're talking about you're you're talking about several million people displaced right now.
Those hurricanes, yes, they did.
No, that's not much about that.
I'm not I'm not saying this isn't the worst, but I'm saying that that that we we we sometimes we lose our historical perspective here.
And uh a lot of people's historical uh uh perspective or education begins with the day they were born, and whatever happens to their life is either the best it's ever been or the worst it's ever been.
And oftentimes that's not the case.
Now, with with with Mayor Nagan, uh I don't really have enough time here before the uh segment ends to address all of what you said, but I would like to, so I will do so after the break ends.
But I think you know, the carping that you heard uh from our caller in the previous hour and what you've heard from me uh about about governor, I'm sorry, Mayor Nagan, uh, is justified.
And particularly uh over the events of the past three days, if not in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, I will explain that to you while you listen when we come back after this brief EIB obscene profit break center.
Stay with you're listening to Rush Limbaugh on the excellence in podcasting network.
Well, the uh National Hurricane Center's just upgraded Hurricane Rita Vandenhoobel to a uh category two.
The winds are now at 100 miles an hour.
Now, Ben and Shreveport, I know you're still out there.
Here's here's my thought or my thinking.
Here's my thinking on the uh on the conversation, the carping, as you called it on uh on Mayor Ray Negan of last hour.
Uh you said uh people want to get back into New Orleans.
I totally understand.
I can relate personally.
Uh last Labor Day a year ago uh was when the first of the two hurricanes struck within twenty miles, thirty miles of where we are here, and I was out in uh in Los Angeles for the Labor Day weekend.
And I watched the hurricane go through, and all of a sudden I wasn't able to reach anybody back here by telephone.
And I wasn't able to reach anybody for about four days.
And I had no clue what had happened because where I live, they they didn't care to you know get a whole lot of television shots.
Uh there really wasn't much to know, and the authorities here were not letting people on the island, so there really wasn't there wasn't a whole lot to know for a number of days.
And I was uh frustrated as I could be, and I wanted to get back and see what kind of damage there was, but it it took a while.
So I I know what you're talking about.
I know you want to get back in there.
I know you want to see if you have anything left and what it is.
Well, you have to look at these things of yesterday involving the mayor saying, Come on back in if you're in these zip codes, and go back three weeks ago.
It there is a pattern here.
The mayor welcoming people back into New Orleans, and we all know it's because he too wants the city to return to normalcy.
He wants people to get back home.
But was it time?
The truth of the matter is that it wasn't Hurricane Rita that caused Ray Nagan to change his mind.
Agents of the federal government got on the phone, and I am sure, in no uncertain terms, said, Mayor, this is an ab you can't do this.
You don't have a sewage system.
You don't have grocery stores with food, you don't have an infrastructure.
We don't have final tests on the water safety.
This it it you you need another week here.
We can't possibly do this.
This is not the time to do it.
Now you're in charge.
We understand it, but you we really don't think this is the time to bring everybody back in yet.
And so the mayor decided to not only cancel the welcome home he made, he told everybody still there to get back out again.
Now, this is probably a microcosm of what happened in the days before the hurricane, when nobody knew what anybody else was doing.
We know that the president was calling the governors and you've got to declare an emergency.
You've got to do something, get these people out of there.
We know this at the we know it from a number of different sources.
Now, people say, well, that's carping on the past.
Uh it may be, but it's recent past.
And we're talking about making sure it doesn't happen again in the future.
Well, finding out why what went wrong went wrong is part of making sure it doesn't happen again and being honest about it.
And we're not gonna we're not gonna solve anything if the sole lesson we learned from this is the federal government didn't get there on time, folks, because that's not how this country is set up.
You ever heard of Posse Comatatist?
The federal government just can't go in.
They just can't send the military wherever they want and take over.
It's an 1870s law.
Posse comitating.
You can't do it.
But because so many people in this country have been educated in the wrong way, the federal government's the beginning, the middle, and the end of life.
It's the end all and the solution solution to all problems.
The people do not know some some relative uh facts and history.
So you you clearly we we we've got we've got circumstances going on down there that that they're just not of the best circumstance right now.
They're not, I don't know how to say this, because I'm white, you know, and if I if I launch, I will be accused of being a racist.
I'm only joking.
I'm good, I will feel free to launch, but I am telling you that charge would probably be made by some people.
But the fact of the matter is that we have for two or three times now, in little less than a month, we have public displays of something less than competence.
And we have seen now that it is the federal government that has stepped in with some common sense about this return of citizens to New Orleans.
Now, some of you might be saying, Well, you know what?
To hell with all government.
It's my house, it's my city.
I can go there whenever I want.
I can go there and check out what I've got.
Uh well, to that I would say, wait a minute, you can't have it both ways.
You can't sit there and say the federal government's to blame for everything for not protecting you, not taking care of you, not getting you out of there, not saving you or what have you.
And then when the government's trying to do just that, get on their case.
So I think there are lessons.
So it's like I mentioned to uh uh Alvin in the last hour.
When Hurricane Katrina came through here uh as a category one and took that southwesterly dip and basically fired blanks at us, we had about an inch and a half of rain right off the ocean, right out of the east, driven by 40 mile an hour winds.
Well, I discovered during this that in one of the windows on the first floor of my house, water was pouring in.
Not poor, dripping pretty rapidly.
So I heard it and I walked in and I said, whoa, look, I grabbed some towels and I put it down, put the towels down and and uh required a bucket.
And uh when when the weather had cleared, of course I called the contractor who built the house and I said it leaked here, and uh don't don't understand how this is coming in.
Uh and we had to go all the way back to find out, you know, how the house was built and all that, and we tested it, we finally found the source of the leak, but it did require looking back.
It did require looking at how the place was built and where it c could have possibly happened.
So this this notion that that uh, well, looking back is uh there's this this carping and so forth.
Sometimes it's necessary if you're gonna be honest about making sure that these things don't repeat themselves.
And folks, there are a lot of things here.
I mean, it it's not just the mayor, and it's not just the governor.
There are a whole bunch of people in this whole chain.
You had money pouring out of Washington into this area to fix those levies, and it never got to the levies.
You had more money being spent in five years on the core of engineers of the George Bush administration than in the previous five years under Bill Clinton.
Somehow it never got to the levies.
Then you have to look at the environmentalists.
What have they done by demanding river diversions and a number of other things which stopped the Mississippi Delta from being built up, which allowed the city to keep sinking?
I mean, there's so much here that needs to be looked at.
If we've got the guts to do it honestly, then we'll be able to prepare for the next time.
But if we're just going to sit here and say it's federal government, because George Bush is president, he didn't care about black people.
If we're going to do that, then this is going to happen again and again and again because the people who are responsible are going to be scapegoated for whatever politically correct reason we can come up with.
And we're going to go through the motions of telling ourselves we fix this when we haven't.
Now the same thing is happening to the Democratic Party right now.
The Democratic Party has no clue why it's falling apart, because it doesn't think that it is.
The Democratic Party today thinks that it's winning.
The Democratic Party finally now thinks, because of these presidential approval polls, that their message is out and that they are going to retake the House and Senate in 08, if not 06.
They think, they really do.
They believe that they're carping on Bush and has finally driven his numbers down, and they think what it means is that the country hates Republicans now.
They think it means that the country doesn't trust Republicans.
They love government now.
They just know it's not good in the hands of Republicans, and they just know that this country is ready to return Democrats to power.
They believe this.
They think mission accomplished.
They don't see the reality.
The reality is that the American people, by and large, and there are polls that indicate this, see them as a bunch of whining political opportunists who haven't offered a solution to improve anything in years.
They don't see the American people pining away for the days of Bill and Hillary.
They think the American people are, but they aren't.
They have got it just 180 degrees out of phase.
Here, let there was a friends at Newsmax have us have a story here on uh on Howard Dean.
Uh let me find the yes, yes, yes, yes.
It's uh got it right here.
I don't know what the occasion of this was.
Uh, but it's from yesterday.
And this and the headline of the story, Howard Dean, I saved the Democratic Party.
DNC Chairman Howard Dean is now boasting that he's the savior of the Democratic Party in a none too subtle slap at former party chief Terry McAuliffe, not to mention John Kerry.
Asked why he wanted to run the Democrat National Committee.
Oh, this he was on the view last week.
He announced this on the view.
That's another show that the Democrats probably think Americans will not miss.
Asked why he wanted to run the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean told the view somebody had to save the party.
The translation, somebody had to be honest about how kooky we really are, and I have the money to prove it.
So I'm going to show everybody we have become kooks.
I've saved the party by letting everybody know we really are a bunch of kooks.
He insisted that Democrats were heading in the wrong direction before he took over.
He told one of the hosts on the view, we thought we're going to win by becoming Republicans.
When have they ever tried to become Republicans?
The only Democrat that I can think of recently who has tried to pass herself off as a Republican is Hillary.
Memo to Hillary, moving to the center and you have to move right to get there will cut your support off at the knees.
The ex-Vermont governor suggested that Senator Kerry didn't have the backbone to defeat President Bush in last year's election.
He said, if you want to win, it's not so much what you believe, it's whether you're willing to fight for what you believe.
And the Democrats had given up.
We had simply not been willing to stand up and fight.
Now, in this sense, he may have a point to a point.
They haven't been honest about who they are and what they stand for, but their actions have told us who they are, from the well stone memorial to the rock war to the war on terror, they are telling us exactly who they are at each each and every day.
Whether it's their elements of the mainstream media, whether it's their politicians, whether it's Dingy Harry, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Ted Kennedy, Patrick Leahy, these are the stars of the Democrat Party.
They are telling us every day who they are.
His bizarre attack on his fellow Democrats was unnoticed by the mainstream press.
Or if they did notice it, they ignored it.
Of course, we can't forget that uh that Howard Dean once said the truth is the Republicans are a white Christian party.
They don't welcome and embrace diversity.
He also blasted the Bush administration what he charged was a bid to deflect blame over Hurricane Katrina, saying that really was a Carl Rove inspired thing to go attack the local people.
Yeah, but when it came to uh school bus Nagan, Dean turned defensive, saying it wasn't his fault that the city school buses weren't used to evacuate his trapped constituents.
He said the school Buses were controlled by the school board, not the mayor.
You can't blame the mayor for that.
So I'm telling you, they are in utter denial.
They think that they have won elections now in 2006.
They think they have beat the president on Hurricane Katrina.
They think Cindy Sheehan represents the new face of the party.
They think that they have now succeeded and are going to get troops out of Iraq.
They have failed to notice a second successful election in Afghanistan, where m maybe more women than men voted.
And I've got a I've got, if you want to hear it, I I have a uh little recitation of the uh Afghanistan elections and how successful they were, and how meager the attempts of the Taliban were to stop them.
I addressed this a little bit yesterday.
Point is that there are there's a huge current of terrific things happening, not just in the world, but in this country.
Democrats don't notice them, don't want anybody else to notice them.
They're in utter denial and utter reality.
They literally believe, folks, that they have turned the corner.
They have no clue whatsoever.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back and continue in just a moment.
As far as Hurricane Rita impacting uh New Orleans and Mississippi, the National Hurricane Center's just uh I've not seen this before.
They just released a 2 p.m. track.
Uh and it's pretty much the same as it's always been.
They've moved it a little bit left uh now.
Uh let me check this.
Hang on a minute.
I'm saying something different on television.
Let me double check this.
Yeah, that's right.
The um they moved it left even of Houston now, west even of Houston and Galveston.
Uh looks like their track has it uh perfectly dissecting the Texas coast between Louisiana and Mexico.
Uh but the cone of possible movement does not even include eastern Louisiana now.
Uh and the hurricane it's getting bigger.
There could be uh I've heard I've heard talk that three or four more inches of rain could cause the temporary levee repairs to burst and uh and cause some flooding again, so I'm sure that's what they're looking at.
But as far as the track is I just looked at all the computer models, too, that I can find, and this may not be all of them, but uh all the models converge of this track hitting Texas.
None of the models, some couple of models earlier uh yesterday and last night did have one of the models had it going uh into Louisiana, but they've now all converged in uh in central and the central Texas coast.
Uh so New Orleans and Mississippi appear, at least at this point, to not be in the current forecast cone.
It cone gets bigger uh as you forecast farther out.
There's a 250-mile uh possibility on a five-day forecast.
Uh it's that imprecise.
Here's John in Westminster, Maryland.
You're next, sir.
Nice to have you on the EIB network.
Hey, Rush.
Listen, the protections that the federal government could offer that would be effective in the c in the face of a category five hurricane would be so invasive and so utterly require so much force to put into place that people would reject it out of hand.
And the, you know, the people would complain constantly about the amount of invasiveness that the federal government was imposing on them.
And just for an example of this, let's look at the Patriot Act.
The Patriot Act is there to protect us from you know certain doom if things happen.
And what do people do?
Rather than uh, you know, being thankful that the protective measures are in place, they sit around complaining about the Patriot Act itself.
Yeah, and the intrusions on their freedom.
Exactly.
There's that's a good point.
There's there's something else to add to this, though, too.
Um look at if they bring this in as an example.
Look at abortion.
Uh abortion right now roils this country because it's not been decided democratically.
Nine guys in robes, nine people in robes decided this 1973.
So it's not been decided by the people of this country.
It's been decided by nine lawyers.
Now, if Roe vs.
Wade is ever overturned, all it means is is the states decide it individually.
That's what happens.
The states in this constitution, in the federal constitution, have quite a lot of power, but more and more people, and this is because of 50, 60 years of liberalism uh brought to brought to actually Woodrow Wilson might be the founding father, but FDR certainly was a uh a contributing figure.
Uh more and more people, federal government is the end all be all to every problem that you have.
And it's it's not the way the federal government set up, especially, as you say, on disasters uh such as hurricanes or tornadoes or or what have you.
Quick timeout, we'll be back.
Stay with us.
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Fastest three hours in media.
And already two of the three today are in the can.
But sit tight and be patient as we will uh prepare our stacks of stuff and come back and get started with all the rest of the program right after this top-of-the-hour EIB extreme profit center break.
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