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Sept. 22, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:43
September 22, 2005, Thursday, Hour #3
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I know, but I'm not I'm not quite ready yet.
I'm looking for that Al Gore story.
I knew I put it in the bottom of the stack here, and I can't find it because I've gone back to the uh archives and I've found the audio sound bite where I What in the world did I do with this?
It's the Deborah Oren story about Well, I'll see if I can just recall it.
Greetings, folks, and welcome back.
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Um I'm afraid to do this so I find this Al Gore story, but th there's a there's a story of Deborah Oren, and I know I put this in the stack here somewhere today, because I've already done it.
I usually put it at the bottom.
Uh but Deborah Oren has a story that Al Gore's thinking seriously about getting back into the Would you just go to the New York Post website and get get the piece?
I'm not going to waste time here trying to find it in front of people when I know it's right in front of me and I can't see it because I may be turning two pages at a time.
It isn't the printer.
Well, it isn't on the printer yet.
Um But when it gets here, I'll uh get it.
Because that the point that she she has a quote from some activist, some Democrat strategist saying this could be Al Gore uh this could be Richard Al Gore's Richard Nixon moment.
I made this analogy uh to Al Gore uh and said that's what this uh move of his looked to me uh as though it were.
Uh we went back to the archives and found that in um January of 2004.
So but I want to get that story and read that quote before I get into the soundbite.
So as soon as I get that article printed back out, I will um what?
What's that?
One pages up.
Uh Mr. Snerdley, um this is so great.
You printed the page that requires you to log into the New York Post before you get the story.
Oh, okay.
Well, uh whatever.
I whatever has been printed to me.
Folks, I'm sorry for this lack of preparation.
It's nobody's fault but mine.
I cannot find the story I told you about in the first hour, and I know it's in this stack.
I keep opening this stack and I keep getting that Tina Brown lap dance of uh of Bill Clinton.
I did no matter what I do, that's the story I keep going to in this stack.
And I and I don't want to go through that again.
Let me tell you about this piece that I talked to about Jim Pinkerton uh writing in Newsday.
He's a uh he's a columnist, even with fallen leader, G O P. Reigns, R. E. I. G. N. S. So is George W. Bush sunk?
Can the Republican Party stay buoyant no matter what happens to this president?
Hurricane Katrina signals the end of the Bush era, according to E.J. Dion in a widely circulated op-ed piece in last week's Washington Post.
Dion acknowledged that the Constitution assures W three more years in office, but he nevertheless insists that Bush is becoming irrelevant to the future direction of the country, which the liberal Dion wants to see zag to the left.
Well, I've already told you this.
The Democrats already think that Bush is finished.
They've won on every score.
Katrina they've won.
They've won an Iraq, they've won on the war on terror on every issue.
They think they've turned the corner and destroyed Bush's presidency.
So Pinkerton says, well, things do seem dire for Bush.
Having made five trips to the stricken Gulf Coast, he's still stricken politically, with the exception of John Roberts, who seems destined for an easy confirmation as Chief Justice.
Bush's once ambitious domestic agenda has been blown away over the past six months.
Meanwhile, in Iraq, Americans are still dying, and just on Monday, a high-ranking official of the White House Office of Management and Budget was arrested on obstruction of justice charges.
No wonder the polls show Bush's approval rating percentage in the low forties.
Maybe the luck that carried him from the private sector to the Oval Office in just six years has abandoned him.
But of course, Bush's political fortunes don't matter all that much because he'll never again be on the ballot.
What matters more to Bush's party is what happens in future elections.
And on that score, Republicans have grounds for continued optimism.
Who says so?
Michael Barone, who for decades has been one of America's keenest political anal analysts.
Every two years since 72, Barone has been the principal author of the almanac of American politics.
Each work is a classic of political reference, a brick of statistics and insight about each state.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Barone begins by observing that the networks have been superseded by the network.
That is television, especially broadcast TVs, less important than the get out the vote programs.
Many of them run out by churches and enabled by the Internet.
Future elections, he argues, are likely to be battles of turnout, not TV.
And indeed, the John Kerry forces outspent Bush by some $50 million last year in the TV air game, but the Republicans won because they uh invested instead a better voter contact ground game.
Uh, which makes sense in the ever fragmenting media verse, it's increasingly difficult to reach broad audiences.
If Barone's right, then the news as delivered by the media could prove less influential on the next election than the news as delivered through person-to-person motivation.
Obviously, national issues will always matter, but as Republicans proved in both congressional and presidential elections last year, individual attention to each voter is key.
And of course, the Republican get out the vote effort throughout this country was profound.
It was it was deep into neighborhoods.
North Carolina and Iowa and all over the uh all over the country.
So looking ahead to 2006, Barone sees some good news for Republicans.
He says that Bush carried 31 states last year compared to Kerry's 19.
That means if the trend toward polarization continues, red states getting redder, blue states getting bluer.
The GOP has little reason to fear losing the Senate.
A similar GOP geography advantage holds true in the House.
Barone counts twenty congressional districts that carry one with 80% of the vote compared to zero for Bush.
What that means is that Bush's vote was more evenly spread out.
Indeed, Bush won a 255 congressional districts last year to carry his 1080.
So again, if Republicans can merely hang on to the Bush base, they can hang on to control.
For his part, the conservative Barone would like to see the Republicans stay on top, Bush or no Bush, but he earned his reputation as an analyst, not an advocate.
Indeed, the data he has assembled in his new book speak louder than any partisan could.
And to an ex to a certain extent, that analysis of what Barone's book is is uh right on the money.
But I I would add something to this.
Um here we are in 2000.
I'm just gonna be re recapitulating some things I've said in the last week.
It is stunning to watch the Democrats think that they have turned the corner, that they have won with Cindy Sheehan, that they've won with Hurricane Katrina.
They were hoping to win with uh with Hurricane Rita.
They think that they have won on the war.
They really they they think it's all over.
They're convinced that they're gonna win back the Senate in 06, and they are really convinced they're gonna win the White House in 2008.
They did they're convinced.
But while they're convinced of this, what nobody's talking about is how they are falling apart.
Barone alludes to it here in the number of congressional districts Bush won versus the number that that that carry won.
255 to 180.
He alludes to it in a number of other ways.
But the one thing the left just cares about more than anything is the Supreme Court, and they are going to lose that.
The the the other thing, uh in addition to the the general implosion taking place with the the prominence here of the of their new base uh being incapable of persuading anybody to join them, other than those who are already such fire brands.
They're not building any sort of a movement.
They don't have any agenda.
They don't tell us what they are for.
All they do is whine, moan, and complain, which is why I spent so much time yesterday.
It's time for the Democrats to tell us what they're for.
Anybody can complain, anybody can gripe, anybody can hide behind a mask and try to deny who they really are.
It's time that we found out who you are from your lips yourselves.
And the activist base is willing to do that.
And the more they speak up, the louder they get, the less they are going to attract political support.
And now to see Gore getting back in, forcing Hillary to the left, we're watching a party that is slowly committing suicide.
While they think that they are triumphing over everything.
They've just failed to prevent John Roberts to get on the court either as a justice or the as a chief justice.
They're now loading up for the battle on the next justice, but they're gonna lose that.
They're gonna lose that one too.
And there will be another nomination before Bush leaves office.
The odds are, I mean, I don't have any inside information, but the odds are there will be.
So if he gets three and succeeds in putting the people he says he's gonna put on the court, well, I they can think they're winning all day long.
Uh, while all we see is them getting smaller and smaller in a rear view mirror as we drive into the future.
But beyond all of that, they continue to base their entire strategy and their entire campaign on running against somebody who is never ever again going to be on another ballot, who is never ever again going to get another vote or seek one.
And that's George W. Bush.
So I'm I'm uh all content, and believe me, don't worry, they're not they're not gonna listen to what I say.
They're not gonna believe that they're imploding, they're they're just gonna think I'm insane.
They're gonna think that I've lost my mind.
In fact, they're gonna be even more convinced that they are right as they listen to me.
Look at me, folks, as one of the biggest assets we have in making sure the left stays where they are and does continue to shrink in the rear view mirror.
All right, I gotta run.
We'll be back and continue.
Got your phone calls coming up as well uh in the remainder of the program.
After this, stay with us.
All right, you got you standing by on uh audio soundbite number 16.
All right, here's here's this story.
A top Democratic strategist adds Americans love comebacks, and Gore could come back as a real human being instead of a wooden guy.
He could come back as the new Nixon, somebody who went into the wilderness and found himself.
So we went back.
I knew that I had compared Gore to Nixon sometime in the past, and here's how it happened.
It was uh it was when Gore endorsed Dean.
And I compared this to um uh Nixon uh out there and doing everything he could to support Goldwater.
Goldwater was considered a kook at the time, you know, one of these fringe conservatives.
Well, who's this guy?
But Nixon saw what the future of the party was.
And so the same thing's being said here about Gore, that he endorsed Dean uh and also supported him for head of the Democratic National Committee, because he saw that Dean had the ear of the new base of the Democrat Party.
And it was shortly after that that Gore then started going out, making all these speeches, shouting and screaming and having people commenting on his sanity, and his audiences were George Soros groups and moveon.org and all these other uh uh activist groups.
And now we learn that Gore is seriously thinking about getting back in for 2008.
So the Nixon analogy uh made today by a Democrat strategist was first announced uh enunciated on this program January 13th of 2004.
Al Gore is looking at himself as Richard Nixon.
If Dean represents a Goldwater movement, follow me on this, folks.
Pat Buchanan had this analysis, and it's it's right on the money.
During the Goldwater movement, everybody thinks that Reagan was a big supporter, and he was, but it was Nixon who had just gotten through being, you know, shellacked and said, You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore.
Here came Goldwater and Nixon saw new life in the Republican Party, and he became one of Goldwater's biggest champions.
And he was out there doing everything he could to support Goldwater.
And he let it be known, and he was very public in his support for Goldwater, so that when it came his time in 1968, the conservatives who had supported Goldwater thought Nixon was one of them.
Nixon was to be rewarded for his loyalty.
So Nixon gets elected in 68.
Now that's what Gore, I think, is doing with Dean.
Gore sees an opportunity here to get loyal treatment from the DENIACs, who he thinks are the new foundation of the Democratic Party.
Well, Gore is as wrong on this as he's ever been about everything else, but you can see the strategy that he's attempting to employ here.orgs and the Soros group and so forth.
And uh I remember when he endorsed Dean Piff, whoa, what is this?
Uh people thought he'd lost his mind.
Uh uh or no, people thought he's never going to get his mind back.
Uh but one way or the other, uh, it has stood him in good stead as the Democratic Party has uh evolved and is now taken the shape and the identity of the uh fringe kooks at one time who have now become the uh the party's base.
Now, where the thing breaks down is you know, Nixon was able to win because conservatives were in an ascension.
This breaks down because liberals are not ascending anywhere.
Liberals are descending, and Gore is joining uh Titanic.
He's joining a sinking ship.
He's gonna become the captain if he tries to get the nomination and succeeds.
That's the big difference.
So the analogy doesn't hold all the way through.
Karen in Valley Glenn, California.
I'm glad you called and welcome to the program.
Hi, Rush.
It's an honor to talk to you.
Thank you.
Ditto's from Deep Blue Blue Country.
Thank you.
Where we make the difference getting out the vote.
Um talking about the Pinkerton column.
Yes.
Um, we are about just watch, I just wanted to give you a heads up because Arnold has saved his money and has saved his efforts, and we are the walkers, we are the town hall conservatives, we are the people that knock on doors and explain what's what.
And with none of the icky candidates in the way, we're gonna take to the road to our streets and neighborhoods and get the vote out and explain what these issues are, and you're gonna see that Arnold will spend a ton less than the teachers unions that are already spending millions.
You know, it is an interesting point that uh that Baron makes about and I think he's right.
It's not just television ad money, it's the whole influence of what used to be called a dominant media, the mainstream media.
Uh I think there's just less trust, and there's so many ads that people get turned off by them.
The old axiom was, hey, these negative ads work, that's why people keep using them.
But at some point they wear you out.
Uh you you run out your emotional reservoir empties, and you just you you no longer can be affected by them.
And this personal contact that you're talking about uh does have more impact.
Uh and it it's just illustrative of now of an of an evolving political process where the left is still years behind uh still operating from their same old playbook.
So you you we're doing it the old fashioned way, but it's that one-on-one touch, and I'm the person that like got the neighborhood to put speed bumps in.
So I they already know me and trust that I want what's good for all of us, and so they at least open the door to me.
All right, that's just so you're this you're the speed bump babe.
I'm the speed bump.
I'm the actually we have to call him speed humps now, but yeah.
No, don't let them call you that.
Well, they just know that I'm that I care about what's going on in our neighborhood with our for real.
And so they at least give me the time of day, and these are very, very blue people.
Well, why are you supporting Arnie again or Arnold?
Uh you know what?
I was on the t and my my vote was really s wavering last week.
I wanted to know what he was going to do about setting aside our our decision on Prop 22, and he stood with us.
I'm hoping he's gonna stand with us against Gil Cityo.
You know, there really needs to be a proposition out here where when we say no, we mean no.
Our legislators like Mark Leno don't care what the people say.
If this was a good thing, well, you know what they said, put him to bed without dinner because he's gonna be able to do that.
They said to do that.
They said that vote was just for show for their uh uh for their constituents, that they never really expected Arnold to uh to sign that bill that would uh overturn Prop 22.
I think that's bogus.
I think these guys fully intended to overturn the will of the people because they're Democrats and don't trust the will of the people, even in a state that they run.
Now, one other thing that Arnold did that I saw Arnold is continuing to raise the rhetoric on illegal immigration and talking about friendly relations with people like the minute men who want to um uh the citizens that want to patrol the border.
And I'm telling you, if he doesn't waver on that, if he doesn't go weak knee or knobbly, uh wobbly on the uh on the immigration issue, uh teachers' unions can spend all the money they want, uh, combined with the efforts that you and your friends uh are going to be making out there, and it it uh it should work regardless of the polls.
You're listening to Rush Limbaugh on the excellence in podcasting network.
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There are only two, the EIB Northern Command and the EIB Southern Command.
Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Crichton, the uh the great author, delivered a speech to the Commonwealth Club uh in San Francisco on September 15th.
Uh that would be one week ago today for those of you in Rio Linda.
And I'm not gonna read a whole thing to you, uh, but I do want to read elements.
I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer.
The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda.
Perceiving the truth's always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age, or as I think of it, the disinformation age, it takes on a special urgency and importance.
We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems or non problems.
Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us, in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward, and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality.
In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine and which are false because they're handed down or sold to us or generated by our own hopes and fears.
As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism.
And in order not to be misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people and the consequences to the environment.
I believe it is important to act in ways that are sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this will always be a need uh carrying into the future.
I believe the world has genuine problems.
I believe it can and should be improved, but I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance.
I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry.
But I think we do not recognize our past failures and face them squarely, and I think I know why.
I studied anthropology and c anthropology in college.
One of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear.
They can't be eliminated from society.
One of these structures is religion.
Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people, the best people, the most enlightened people, don't believe in any religion.
But I think you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind.
If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another.
You cannot believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life and shapes your sense of the world, and such a belief is religious.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western world is environmentalism.
Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists.
Why do I say it's a religion?
Well, just look at the beliefs.
If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect twenty-first century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There's an initial Eden, a Paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature.
There's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge.
And as a result of our actions, there is a judgment day coming for us all.
We are all energy sinners, doomed to die unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability.
Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment.
Just as organic food is communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs imbibe.
Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday, these are deeply held mythic structures.
They are profoundly conservative beliefs.
They may be even hardwired into the brain for all I know.
I certainly don't want to talk about anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God who rose from the dead.
But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't.
These are not facts that can be argued, these are issues of faith.
Something I have always said, by the way.
You can't argue faith by definition.
But anyway.
And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism.
Increasingly it seems that facts are not necessary because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief.
It's about whether you're going to be a sinner or whether you're going to be saved, whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation or on the side of doom.
Whether you're going to be one of us or one of them.
Am I exaggerating to make a point?
I'm afraid not.
Because we know a lot more about the world than we did forty or fifty years ago, and what we know, what we know now, is not so supportive of certain core environmental myths.
Yet the myths don't die.
Let's examine some of those beliefs.
There is no Eden.
There never was.
What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past?
It is the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five, when one woman in six died in childbirth, when the average lifespan was forty as it was in America 100 years ago, when plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke.
Was it when millions starve to death?
Is that when it was Eden to the environmentalists?
And what about indigenous peoples living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment?
Well, they never did.
On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed up to accelerate the process.
He goes on and on and on here, but the uh excuse me.
The uh the point is, and I again I I I like this because I have described environmentalism as a religion.
That their god is a tree or that their god is some element of nature, and they don't need facts, and they try to make everybody feel guilty, and they try to convince everybody that we, by simply living our lives as sinners are destroying this planet, and so forth, and it all harbors on this belief that used to be pristine.
Those redwood forests or what those jungles, the rainforest, all used to be pristine.
It was just fine and dandy till we got here.
And then we started, and it's all centered around global warming and how we energy sinners and environmental sinners are destroying the planet and so forth.
And so he's is right in the money.
It is it is totally a religious belief, and many of the people who adopt all this in fact claim to be secularists, who claim to have nothing to do with religion because they think religion is for kooks.
That they are men and women of science.
That they're men and women are cut and bove all of us.
We are mere plebes, incapable of understanding the deep dark secrets that their brilliant alone is able to discern.
And as such, we are but mere foot soldiers.
Our minds are porous, but they can be Shaped.
And they continue to try to shape us each and every day with greater and greater fear and scare tactics.
All the while telling us it's our fault.
All the while claiming to be secularists, because to be religious is to be one of those right wing Christians.
I'm going to be a right wing crowd.
I'm going to be bigger than that.
Yet they are in their own way not secularists at all.
They, in fact, are deeply religious.
They just have a different religion.
But the difference is, as is the case with all the modern left, they haven't got the guts to be honest about who they are and what they really believe.
And I bring all this up because I keep hearing more and more allusion to global warming, being responsible for all of these hurricanes.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Max Mayfield at the Hurricane Center has said it over and over again.
Any responsible meteorologist, William Gray, University of what is it, Colorado State, wherever it is out at uh at uh he's he's uh I forget which Colorado University.
No, because it's at it's at Fort Collins, whatever universities in Fort Collins.
It's Colorado State.
The guy that the expert forecaster, poo-poos, poo-poos the notion that global warming has anything to do with this.
They've got records going back to the 40s, the 30s, and 20s to the early century showing uh that that there were there are cycles, 40-year cycles of violent hurricanes, and we're just entering a new one.
They have been here before.
We've had destructive hurricanes like this before, and long before anybody started talking about global warming at the time, they were talking about global cooling and so forth.
Yet this is all very seductive.
People will want to believe that we are responsible for causing all this because we are people who cannot accept that they are things larger than ourselves.
We have to be able to find somebody mortal to blame, even if it is ourselves now and then for all of these things that we do not understand.
We don't understand these every and it's all, by the way, folks, it is it is crucial to understand that all of this is made easy for these environmental religionists because they know that everybody's historical perspective begins with the day they were born.
Most people think that during their lifespan, things are either better than they've ever been in some areas or worse than they've ever been.
It's never been worse.
People don't know.
They're not told, they're not taught about infant mortality rates being 80%.
They're not taught about the incidents of death in childbirth.
They're not taught even as recently as a hundred years ago.
They're not taught about all the ravages that killed human beings that were just part of nature that we had no ability to control.
People back then thought they were in the last days.
Oh, it's never been worse.
Look at all these diseases and pestilence, we can't stop it.
Well, we've stopped it today.
We still think we're in the worst times we've ever had.
Still think we're in the last days.
Every generation does.
So you've got some pretty smart people have come along and try to capitalize on it in this whole environmental movement.
And all they they can't offer you facts.
They don't have any facts.
All they can offer is emotion and disbelief.
Well, don't you think that 250 million people burning their barbecue pits at the same time is gonna cause something to happen in the atmosphere?
Yeah.
I think the atmosphere can handle it.
I don't think it's come close to what happens when a volcano erupts.
Doesn't come close, you know, we're worried about, we're worried about environmental destruction.
Here comes this hurricane.
This is second hurricane.
Look at what Katrina destroyed in a matter of hours.
Look at what this one could destroy in a matter of hours.
We don't do that unless it's with a bomb, but yet the environmentalists are trying to telling us we're destroying ourselves with these hurricanes, and then it morphs him to Bush's responsible because he hasn't gotten behind the Kyoto Protocol and so forth.
And who are these people, folks, that put all this out there and try to convince you of it, they are not just the American left, but the worldwide left.
And it's important to understand here that while they think they're the smartest people in the room, they are probably the most obstinate and stubborn elitist, And probably know so little compared to what they think they know.
And yet they control institutions of higher learning.
They have controlled the institutions of mainstream media that used to have a monopoly and don't any longer.
So in the midst of all of this, you have to be encouraged and optimistic that the set of circumstances that built the foundation for these people to thrive is slowly being eaten away.
Their religion is crumbling right around them.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back after this.
Stay with us.
I have a piece here by uh Ed Gordon.
I don't know where this ran.
Uh Ed Gordon is the host of National Public Radio's News and Notes with Ed Gordon.
Uh, and it uh it airs on uh NPR stations around the country.
Ed Gordon used to work at uh B.E.T., Black Entertainment Television.
And his uh headline, let Katrina calm the waters of racism.
Our leaders and the rest of us have to talk about the race issues stirred up by the storm.
You know, with all due respect to Ed Gordon.
It seems like my whole life, all we've been doing is talking about race.
And yet I keep hearing these people, yeah, we need to talk about race.
We need to what they mean is we need to admit that Republicans are a bunch of racists and bigots and be done with it once and for all and stop having the argument.
And that's incorrect.
We have we've been talking about race my whole life.
I'm sure we've been talking about race as a society your whole life.
The real problem is they won't let race be discussed in an honest and straightforward way.
Uh, political correctness is reared its head, and you you j you can't you can't talk about it.
It's it's like like some people think that white people can't be critical of black people because they won't have any credibility because it's uh the only black people well, how can we talk about race if you put that requirement out there?
Or that roadblock, or you can't talk about women if you're a man.
Of course, women can talk about anybody, it doesn't matter.
But men can't talk about women unless they're women, and I don't know how many men it wanna be women.
So, uh we're we're balkanizing here all the while hearing we need, we need to finally be honest and talk about race.
And the problem is they actually don't let us talk about race.
Try this.
This is from Reuters.
After the storm came the carjackers and the burglars.
Then came the gun battles and the chemical explosions that shook the restored Victorians in New Orleans, Algiers Point neighborhood.
The hurricane was a breeze compared with the crime and terror that followed, said Greg Harrick Harris, a psychotherapist who lives in the battered area.
As life returned to this close-knit neighborhood three weeks after Hurricane Katrina residents said they hoped their experience could convince political leaders to get serious about the violence and the poor services that have long been an unfortunate hallmark of their city.
I think now it's a wake-up call, said Greg Harris.
After the storm, the neighborhood association had to act as law enforcement, an emergency response unit as city services collapsed and the police force was unable to protect them.
Citizens organized armed patrols and checked on the elderly.
They slept on their porches with loaded shotguns.
They bolted awake when intruders stumbled on the aluminum cans that they had scattered on the sidewalk.
Gunshots rang out for a day, sometimes terrifyingly close.
For Harris, the first warning sign came on Tuesday, the day after the storm when two young men met his partner, Vinny Pravell over or beat his partner, uh hit his partner, I'm sorry, over the head and drove off with his Ford van.
The residents heard that police vehicles are being carjacked and looters were taking guns and ammo from nearby stores.
And of course, we don't hear any comments from people about this.
We don't hear any of the comments from any of our leaders about needing to stop this.
All we hear about is how ineffective Bush was.
And the FEMA response.
Greg Harris, a psychotherapist who lives in New Orleans, says for five days we didn't need FEMA.
We didn't need the Red Cross, and we didn't need the National Guard.
The neighborhood took care of itself.
We'll be back because they had no choice.
Back and for this, they would have been called vigilantes.
Back after this.
Stay with us.
I've got Scott from Jackson, Mississippi on the phone here, but I don't have time to take the call, Scott, because of uh time.
But his point is that he disagrees with me that Democrats have to target uh President Bush right now because there's uh no other person running for the GOP nomination.
Uh I understand that, but their attacking of George W. Bush has nothing to do with him on issues.
It has to do with personal hatred.
It has to do with absolute disgust.
They're not advancing an agenda in criticizing Bush.
They're acting as though he was the same candidate he was in 2004 and 2000.
Uh what they're doing is not what is normally conventionally done.
They are distracted and sidetracked by that hatred and rage.
And that's why they're not getting anywhere with this, because everybody knows Bush isn't running.
We'll see you tomorrow on Friday, folks.
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