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Sept. 26, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:47
September 26, 2005, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Folks, I've been asking myself all weekend, why bother to rebuild any of this?
Mississippi, whatever destroyed in Alabama, New Orleans, Louisiana, Texas.
Why rebuild any of it?
Thought hit me like a bolt out of the blue.
Greetings and welcome.
It's Broadcast Excellence.
And we've got a full, well, not going to be here Wednesday.
I have a charitable thing I got to do on Wednesday.
But other than that, it's a full week of busy broadcast action here on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, El Rushbow.
And I just asked the crew here, do I still sound stuffed up?
Because I feel more stuffed up than I did all of last week.
And my voice feels a little weaker today than it did last week.
But they say it sounds fine.
So we'll go with it for as long as it lasts.
Here's the telephone number, 800-282-2882.
And the email address is rush at EIBnet.com.
All right.
And Eastern, by the way, we've got some pretty funny audio soundbites from the so-called anti-American war rally yesterday.
Well, it was in Washington, and everybody's saying they had 100,000 people there.
But, you know, I saw some pictures, some still pictures, and I didn't see a crowd that looked like 100,000 people.
Now, Byron York has written about it.
He says, oh, let's give them the 100,000 people.
That's no more than they've been able to gather for any anti-war rally they've had since the Iraq War started.
So it's obviously not a growing movement.
But hell, some of those people weren't even there to protest the war.
They were protesting Venezuela.
They were protesting for Castro.
I mean, it was the hodgepodge of the truly disaffected, the left out, the inferior, the ones who feel they're inferior.
The losers, life's losers on parade.
Well, you know, we got winners of life's lottery, got the losers of life's lottery by definition.
If you're going to have winners of life's lottery, you're going to have losers.
And the losers were on parade, just upset that they have failed to fit in.
And so they're trying to define what they do and think and believe is normal, I suppose.
But we've got some funny sound bites from it.
But we also, some lighthearted stuff here just to start with, ladies and gentlemen, that may have heard about this story from Idaho Falls, Idaho.
An eastern Idaho weatherman who gained national attention for his unusual theory that the Hurricane Katrina was caused by the Japanese mafia has quit.
Weatherman Scott Stevens is leaving KPVI-TV after 10 years to pursue an unusual theory that Hurricane Katrina was caused by the Japanese Yakuza.
That's their version of the mob.
His last appearance on KPBI-TV of Pocatello was last week.
He claimed that the hurricane was caused by the Yakuza mob using a Russian-made electromagnetic generator to control the weather.
Station says it didn't fire this nut.
Rather, he quit because he's been deluged with emails and interview requests and now wants to devote more time to his theory.
His theory is that the Japanese Yakuza finally found a way to get even for Hiroshima and Nagasaki working together with their allies in the Russian mob.
And then there's, and by the way, folks, I would love to comment on this, but not being a weatherman, I don't know that I'm qualified to weigh in on this.
You know, the advice I've been given recently that if one is not black, one really has no credibility talking about black issues.
Or if one isn't female, one has no credibility talking about, and I'm not certainly not a weatherman.
And we must be open to all points of view.
We must have respect for all points of view.
Good morning America weekend anchor Bill Weir has retracted on-air marks that he made that upset some atheists.
A few weeks ago, he said, we did a story on worshipers returning to the shattered churches of the Gulf Coast.
I made an offhand comment based on an old expression that said there are no atheists in foxholes or hurricane zones, Weir told his viewers on Good Morning America, the weekend version.
Well, many atheists have since pointed out that there were 30 million atheists in this country.
There are 30 million, and among them, they were victims of Hurricane Katrina, first responders and relief donors.
I stand corrected.
He first made this comment way back on September 4th, and it sparked outrage from atheists who launched a campaign directed at him at ABC and its parent company, the Walt Disney Company, demanding a retraction, which they bent over forwards and caved and gave the atheists the retract.
Now, since I'm not an atheist, ladies and gentlemen, I can't comment on this.
I don't really have a thought on this.
I thought about praying before doing the story, but that's about as far as I took it.
Our old buddies of the Associated Press are back.
Hurricane Rita smashed into a region that is wealthier, more mobile, and much less densely populated than the one devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
The headline, Rita's victims wealthier than Katrina's.
So I guess we're to assume here that Hurricane Rita got even.
No, you would be wrong.
Most of Rita's victims are by no means wealthy, but they are less likely to live in poverty.
They are more likely to own a car and less likely to be a member of a minority group than were Katrina's victims, according to an AP analysis of the census data.
But they're still victims.
They're just, I guess, they're not as bad.
They're not as harmed because they're a little wealthier than the Katrina victims were.
Experts said that the wealth and mobility of people in Rita's path, combined with a new sense of urgency following Katrina, led to a more thorough evacuation.
They have cars, said Carnot Nelson, a psychology professor at the University of South Florida.
They have a way to leave.
It's simple as that.
Money and transportation were in short supply for...
Folks, it just...
Of all the ways to look at this...
But, of course, you know, here's the thing about it.
Everybody thinks these things are a piece of cake for the wealthy, but the more you have, the more you have to lose.
I mean, you could say that the wealthy lose more than the poor.
Who's got more by definition?
The wealthy are the poor.
So who loses more?
But then you'll have the same libargo on, well, even if the wealthy have a lot, look at what they still have left after they've lost a lot compared to what the poor who didn't have any going in.
Same principle he used on tax cuts.
Well, tax the wealthy more because even after they pay all those taxes, they still got a lot of money left compared to what the poor have.
Now, my question, why are we even bothering to rebuild?
Take a look here, folks.
And no, this is not a comment on New Orleans being under sea level.
And it's not even a comment about money.
You take a look, take it, take a look at what we have now from a lot of Mississippi through Louisiana, through the coast here, you know, about halfway, well, yeah, maybe halfway up the state, one-third of the way north from the coast, up Louisiana, all the way over now to Texas, down to Galvanisto, Galveston, and so forth.
What do we have there?
What do we have?
Well, we do have wetlands, but we have now, ladies and gentlemen, what the environmentalists, the wacko environmentalists have been praying for, demanding, suggesting we all return to for all the years I've been doing this program.
We have a pristine wilderness.
We have a wilderness uninhabited by the evils of humanity and mankind.
We have no running water.
We have no electricity.
We have very few automobiles, very few SUVs except those under the control of the government and the military.
We have no air conditioning.
So by definition, we have a pristine, finally a pristine environment where Mother Nature's gone in and totally wrecked as much of man's presence as possible.
My question is, why aren't there literally hundreds of thousands of environmentalists flocking to this area to resettle it in a way that they have been advocating all the rest of us live since I have been doing this program?
We have an excellent test case for militant environmentalism right there on the Gulf Coast.
Don't rebuild anything.
Let the people who are going to tell us how we all should live go show us.
Let the environmentalist wackos who advocate, let them give up their SUVs and their redwood decks and their corporate jets and so forth and let them go live there and let them show us.
And look at the money we will save, folks, that we can apply to other important things like Iraq and the war on terror.
We'll be back in just a second.
America's anchorman, Rush Limbaugh, the cutting edge of societal evolution.
Oh, look at that.
The French Quarter, the central business district in Uptown, which is, of course, the fashionable area where resides Congressman William Jefferson, Democrat Louisiana.
I guess his neighborhood is open again.
You get back in there.
Lots of New Orleans is open to business people now to reset the place up.
Funny story here, and it is funny.
There's no other way to look at this.
This story first appeared in The Nation.
Now, The Nation is, well, it's a fringe Bible of the Democratic Party base.
The nation used to be a Trotskyite publication.
It used to be way, way out there, but now the base has caught up with it.
So The Nation is the Bible of the Democrat base.
That's right.
Katrina van den Hoovel, a namesake of the hurricane, Katrina van den Hoovel, the editor over there.
She is the granddaughter of the famous Hollywood studio chief, Jules Stein, by the way.
People wonder who she is.
She's an heiress.
Oh, yes.
From what I was told, she's a granddaughter of the founder of MCA, Jules Stein.
But anyway, those are diversions.
The story first appeared in The Nation, and so excited about it were the socialists in the UK that The Guardian picked it up.
And here is the headline.
This is turning into the ethnic cleansing of New Orleans.
There is empty housing for the tens of thousands made homeless by Katrina, but the white elites have other plans.
Here are the details from this magazine, The Bible.
Well, Bible, they're not reconciled.
Bible.
Which we say this is.
Can't say the Dead Sea Scrolls of the Left.
That would upset them, too.
Can't say Bible.
What is this?
Manifesto, the Manifesto of the Let's The Manifesto of the Left, The Nation.
Here are the here are the details.
Outside the 2,000-bed temporary shelter in Baton Rouge's River Center, a Church of Scientology band is performing a version of Bill Withers' classic Use Me, a refreshingly honest choice.
If it feels this good getting used, the Scientology singer belts out, just keep on using me until you use me up.
The poor people, the people who know how to fix broken houses in New Orleans are all gone.
This is a quote from somebody by the name of 10-year-old Nyler, a 10-year-old lying face down on a massage table, has pretty much the same attitude as the Bill Withers song.
She's not quite sure why the nice lady in the yellow Scientology Volunteer Minister t-shirt wants to rub her back, but it feels so good.
She tells me, so who really cares?
So I asked Nyler if this is her first massage.
She says, nope, since fleeing New Orleans after a tree fell in her house, she's visited this tent many times, becoming something of an assistaholic.
I have nerves, she explains in a blissed out.
This is a serious news story from the Manifesto of the Left, wearing a donated pink t-shirt with an age-inappropriate slogan.
Nyler tells me, and Naomi Klein, by the way, the author of the story, tells me that what she's nervous about, I think New Orleans might never get fixed because the people who know how to fix broken houses are all gone.
I don't have the heart to tell Nyler that I suspect she's onto something, that many of the African-American workers from our neighborhood may never be welcomed back to rebuild their city.
An hour earlier, I had interviewed New Orleans' top corporate lobbyist Mark Drennan as president and CEO of Greater New Orleans Inc.
Drennan was in an expansive mood, pumped up by signs from Washington that the corporations he represents were about to receive a package of tax breaks, subsidies, and relaxed regulations so generous it would make the job of a lobbyist virtually obsolete.
Listening to Drennan enthused about the opportunities opened up by the storm, I was struck by his reference to African Americans in New Orleans as the minority community.
At 67% of the population, they are the clear majority.
Whites like Drennan make up 27%.
It was no doubt a simple verbal slip, but I couldn't help feeling that it was also a glimpse into the desired demographics of the new and improved city being imagined by its white elites.
I honestly don't know, and I don't think anybody knows how they're going to fit in, Drennan said, of the city's unemployed.
So innocent convenient, the left will use the term minority to convey skin color when they want to.
But how often have you ever referred to them as the majority anywhere?
Now they're the majority, and they're still being pushed around by a 20% minority, the white elites.
Ethnic cleansing going on in New Orleans, ladies and gentlemen.
This is the fear of the reasoned thought on the left.
New Orleans is already displaying signs of a demographic shift so dramatic that some evacuees describe it as ethnic cleansing.
Before the mayor called for a second evacuation, the people streaming back into dry areas were mostly white, while those with no homes to return to were overwhelmingly black.
This, we are assured, is not a conspiracy.
It is simple geography, a reflection of the fact that wealth in New Orleans buys altitude.
That means that the driest areas are the whitest, the French Quarter, 90% white, the Garden District, 89%, Audubon, 86%, neighboring Jefferson Parish, where people were also allowed to return, 65%.
Rather than rebuild ghettos, New Orleans should be resettled with mixed-income housing where rich and poor, black and white, live side by side.
That's all the managed community strategy here of the name.
Now, you might think, well, this is rush.
Come on, look at what you're reading from.
I mean, this is not a mainstream view.
It may not be a mainstream view, folks, but I'm telling you, we have become a balkanized society.
These are white liberals writing this stuff.
These are white elite liberals writing this stuff about ethnic cleansing going on in New Orleans.
Let me now take you to a couple sound bites from this anti-American war rally that took place yesterday in Washington, D.C. Here is a portion of remarks from the esteemed Democrat from Georgia, Cynthia McKinney.
As dead bodies lay strewn about the New Orleans superdome, military recruiters blew into Houston's astrome to reap the harvest.
This ill wind that engulfs our country is also global in its impact.
It dipped into the Caribbean, hitting Haiti and Cuba.
It reached into Latin America to slap Venezuela.
It swept death, greed, and destruction across Africa into eastern Congo.
And it breathes occupation onto the peoples of Iraq and Palestine.
I'll tell you, these are damn powerful hurricanes, folks, to do all that.
Cynthia McKinney, and here's one more.
And we'll comment on these here in just a second.
Here's our second bite.
A cruel wind blows across America, starting in Texas and Montana and sweeping across America's heartland.
It settled here in Washington, D.C.
And despite our presence today, it continues to buffer, to buffet and batter the American people.
This cruel wind blew disenfranchisement into Florida and Ohio.
It blew hard-heartedness into the Capitol, division across our land, and wretchedness in high places.
The American people have been forced to endure fraud in the elections of 2000 and 2004.
Criminal neglect on September 11th.
A war started on deliberately faked evidence.
That's Cynthia McKinney doing a pretty good job here of illustrating the mainstream of thought on the American left today and in the American Democrat Party.
I think she got confused with her geography.
I think she thinks Cheney's from Montana.
She cited Montana.
The ill wind is blowing from Texas to Montana.
He's from Wyoming.
Nevertheless, so you had, I know, Wyoming, Montana, they all look alike.
Who can tell the difference, folks?
You look at them on a map.
They look basically the same shape.
They got lines going in the same directions.
I mean, how can you possibly tell the difference between Wyoming and particularly if you came out of the American public school system?
How are you going to know the difference between Montana and Wyoming?
They all look alike.
Even tougher for Colorado and Wyoming, although they look alike too.
How are you going to know?
So they're not going to hold that against her.
But dead bodies strewn around the New Orleans Superdome, that we've got to tackle.
And we'll do that when we come back.
I can't keep a straight face.
You're listening to Rush Limbaugh on the Excellence in Podcasting Network.
Making the complex understandable.
El Rushball, having more fun than a human being, should be allowed to have the four-time National Association of Broadcasters Mark Coney Award winner for syndicated radio personality of the year.
800-282-2882.
By the way, we had a lot of pro-America supporters at the anti-American war rally over the weekend.
And a couple of them, actually, it looks like five or six were freepers.
And they had this giant, they went to the FBI building, and we've posted this at rushlimbaugh.com.
have this giant sign in the correct colors, Club Gitmo, the international answer to terrorism.
Right there in front of the FBI buildings, though Club Gitmo photo gallery is still raging.
All right.
So what was it?
Cynthia McKinney at the anti-American war rally said something about the dead bodies lay strewn about the New Orleans Superdome.
You know, in all candor here, folks, one of the one of the biggest outrages of this whole hurricane has been the totally irresponsible reporting, hysterical responsible, hysterically irresponsible reporting of the mainstream media.
There was a doom and gloom and almost an apocalyptic tone to virtually all the reporting.
And whatever anybody happened to say about the worst got passed along as fact.
And this has been somewhat questioned over the past two weeks.
A bunch of different people have looked into some of these outrageous claims of all the rapes and all the murders at the superdome, at the convention center, all throughout the city in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
So much so that rumor sites, sites that check rumors got into gear and found out that much of this was just rumor mongering itself.
We had this one official from one of the parishes that went on meet the press back on September 4th and told an out-and-out lie about a story where the timeline is concerned.
Back on the show yesterday, Tim Russert sort of read this guy, the riot act.
His name was Aaron Broussard, but he got away with it the first time.
The media cycle, I keep pounding this because it's true.
The media cycle is one thing.
How will this hurt Bush?
How can we make it hurt Bush?
How can this help Democrats?
Well, of course, the whole media cycle with Hurricane Katrina, regardless of all the other currents that are flowing around, the media cycle was this shows that Bush is inept and incompetent and perhaps even a racist and a bigot.
So all these stories survive and they get amplified.
And a lot of people, believe it, I think the president's poll numbers went down because of all this reporting.
Well, the New Orleans Times Pikachune weighs in on this today on their website, NOLA.com.
And the headline is, rumors of deaths greatly exaggerated.
Widely reported attacks, false or unsubstantiated.
Six bodies found at the Superdome, four at the convention center.
After five days managing near riots, medical horrors, and unspeakable living conditions inside the Superdome, Louisiana National Guard Colonel Thomas Barron prepared to hand over the dead to representatives of FEMA.
Following days of internationally reported killings, rapes, and gang violence inside the dome, the doctor from FEMA, Barron, doesn't remember his name, came prepared for a grisly scene.
He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler, three doctors to process bodies.
Barron recalls the doctor saying, I got a report of 200 bodies in the dome alone.
Real total was six.
Of those, four died of natural causes.
One overdosed.
Another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide, said Barron, who personally oversaw the turning over of bodies from a dome freezer where they lay atop melting bags of ice.
State Health Department officials in charge of body recovery put the official death count of the dome at 10, but Barron said the other four bodies were found in the street near the dome, not inside it.
Both sources said that no one had been killed inside.
The nation's frontline emergency management believed the body count would resemble that of a bloody battle at a war, is but one of scores of examples of myths about the superdome and the convention center treated as fact by evacuees, the media, and even some of New Orleans' top officials, including the mayor and the police superintendent.
As the fog of warlike conditions and Hurricane Katrina's aftermath has cleared, the vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees that turned out to be false or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know.
Sergeant First Class Jason Lackney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the dome, said 99% of this is B.S.
Now, don't get me wrong, bad things happen in there, but I didn't see any killing or raping and cutting of throats or anything.
99% of the people in the dome were very well-behaved.
Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan said authorities had confirmed only four murders in New Orleans.
And listen to this paragraph because this sums it all up.
Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan said authorities had confirmed only four murders in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, making it a typical week in a city that anticipated more than 200 homicides this year.
Jordan expressed outrage at reports from many national media outlets that suffering flood victims had turned into mobs of unchecked savages.
I had the impression that at least 40 or 50 murders had occurred at these two sites, he said.
It's unfortunate we saw these kinds of stories saying crime had taken place on a massive scale when that wasn't the case.
And they, the national media outlets, have done nothing to follow up on any of these cases.
They just accepted what people on the street told them.
It's not consistent with the highest standards of journalism.
Really?
The only shocking thing about this isn't anybody's surprise.
This is nothing new.
The elevation of bad news, the amplification of bad news, the questioning or the questionable use of sources.
But we know why it happens.
We know why it happened.
The president did a press conference today.
Well, little bitty press conference.
He went to announce the status of America's energy supply.
And after he finished what he said, he opened it up to questions.
And the first question I think came from, we may even have this.
We do grab audio soundbite number two.
We even have this on tape.
This is our old buddy Nedra Pickler from the Associated Press.
The president has just finished talking about the status of the nation's energy supply and distribution system.
And here's what Nedra Pickler asked.
I want to ask you about a different result of these storms, and that is the racial divide that's been exposed in this country.
Blacks and whites feel very differently about what happened.
We all recognize that the response to Rita was much better than the response to Katrina, but there are some strong feelings in the black community that that difference had a racial component to it, that the white, you know, rural residents got taken care of better than the black urban residents.
How do you respond to that?
Well, I think about Houston, my own hometown of Houston, which is an incredibly diverse city.
And we had what looked like a Category 5 hurricane headed right for Houston.
And the federal, state, and local officials worked together to warn the citizens of the impending storm.
But the message wasn't sent to one group of people.
It was sent to the entire city.
Now, the president went on from that point and listed all of the programs that he has sponsored, legislation that he has sponsored, and that he has signed designed to elevate poor people out of poverty.
He has listed all of the things that he has done that to the average person watching, I don't think they would get it, sadly.
But his point was to say in as diplomatic and presidential way as possible, come on, Nedra, could you get serious?
You're talking about hurricanes that attack based on racism and a federal response based on racism?
You actually think this, he won't say that.
I wish he would.
I wish somebody would say to some of these reports, do you really think, do you really think that all the levels of government, state, federal, local, local, local, local included, actually cared less about what happened to their state and their city because the majority of the people that were harmed by it were black?
Do you really believe that?
He didn't say that.
What he did was cite a number of legislative programs and initiatives that have sought to strengthen the poor and target those who are African American in this country with genuine programs that help.
And it was his way of sort of flicking it aside.
And flicking this aside is not really sufficient.
You have to nuke this.
You have to nuke this whole premise.
Well, here we are.
We've now gone through two hurricanes.
This hurricane hit around the 1st of September, Hurricane Katrina van den Hubel.
And here we are in September 26th, and we are still subjected to questions by the mainstream press.
Was there racism in New Orleans?
Is there racism in New Orleans?
Is there racism in the federal response?
Well, now we got critics, Mr. President.
We have critics, critics, and some black people saying the response in Katrina was much slower than it was for Hurricane Rita.
And it's just, it is breathtaking to behold this.
These people are not even smart.
Some of these reporters don't even have the ability to think.
It is just they get caught in this template, this mindset.
I know it's purposeful because they're all enemies of the president and they want to do everything they can to harm the guy.
But it is still, folks, it's still as a human, as a thinking, engaged human being.
It still amazes me.
And these are journalists, the lack of genuine curiosity that they possess.
It is just beside me.
So I do this with this order, this New Orleans story, Cynthia McKinney, followed by the New Orleans story, followed by Ned Ruppickler, to illustrate.
Here you have a Democrat congressperson who is just literally out of her mind at the anti-American war rally yesterday, literally shouting lunatic things, followed by the New Orleans Times Picayune putting the myth to the story of all the horrors, all the rapes, all the murders, all the slit throats, all that savagery that went on.
It didn't happen.
Then we go back to Ned Ruppickler asking President Bush about that very thing.
And is it the federal government's fault?
It just, I'm slowly running out of adjectives to describe my incredulity.
Well, quick timeout, though.
We'll be back and continue here in just a moment.
Stay with us.
Hang on.
I'm printing something else.
I cannot believe it.
Come on, Critic America.
Calypso Louie is back.
The Nation of Islam chief, Calypso Louie, Minister Louis Farrakhan, has now expanded on his theory that New Orleans levees were blown up during Hurricane Katrina, announcing Friday that divers working on the levee break have found evidence of explosives.
These explosives are from the government side, said Calypso Louie at a press conference in Memphis held to promote his upcoming million man anniversary march.
In quotes picked up by the Memphis TV station WMC, Calypso Louie demanded an investigation into the Bush administration's levy plot.
You know, if this weren't so sad, it's hilarious, but the frightening thing is you got people like Cynthia McKinney and Calypso Louie, and they've got an audience that's buying into this.
You know, these are Americans that they're just literally polluting their minds.
It's like the polling data that came out after Katrina.
You know, nine out of 10 white people see no racism whatsoever in anything to do with the response.
Something like eight out of 10 African Americans do.
Now, the African Americans are the outliers when you have, and by the way, the white Americans, other Americans, all Americans except blacks were asked the question, and then blacks were asked separately.
So you've got 80, 90% of America, no racism here, but yet you've got 70, 80% of the African-American population think there was.
Now, they're truly outliers, and they're being led in that fashion.
They've got people like the Reverend Jacks and McKinney, to whatever extent that she has influence, John Conyers, Charlie Bull Wrangel, and now Calypso Louis getting in on the action.
It's just, it's, he said, somebody's guilty, and then not only of mass destruction of property, but of mass murder.
Mass murder.
What mass murder?
We just got through telling you there is not mass death in New Orleans.
There wasn't mass death.
There wasn't mass murder.
There wasn't mass accidental.
There wasn't mass raping.
There wasn't gang anything, mass gang anything going on other than the looting.
And that probably was no more than usual in New Orleans anyway.
Everything was pretty normal.
The death rate there, they have 200 murders a year.
They had something like 10 total in the aftermath here in these three weeks.
You know, it amortizes out to be about right.
Yet all this stuff still percolates out there.
There's Jim in South Bend, Indiana.
Welcome, Search.
Great to have you on the program.
Megadittos, Rush, from the home of the fighting Irish in the new home for Charlie Weiss.
Yes, sir.
Doing well out there, too.
Yes, he's a disciplined, great guy.
Rush, to the point, every time I heard that number, I questioned it.
10,000 dead, not a house standing in New Orleans.
And I believe that it was those numbers went out aided and abetted by the media that loves catastrophe.
But I think that those numbers were pumped from the very beginning to extract sympathy from the American people and the Red Cross for donations.
And I hate to sound that cold, Rush, but when you look at the city and these people were in there while these numbers were coming out, you couldn't really have any basis of fact for those numbers of 10,000 dead and not a dwelling standing in any of the parishes.
Well, by the same token, here's the problem, and I think you have a point.
The problem is when you looked at the pictures, you could believe these numbers.
You could believe this worst case scenario.
Now, I want to go on record.
I'll be glad to go back and play the tapes of this program on the Monday after the weekend this hurricane hit.
I'll be glad to tell you how I thought there was so much exaggerating and so much fatalism and so much doom and gloom going.
This is before the levees broke.
But I still, and I stand by it today.
I just, it's, folks, it sounded just like the reporting we get out of Iraq.
It sounded just like the reporting we got out of Club Guetmo or Abu Grab or anywhere else America is when George Bush is the president.
It's the end of the world.
It's fatalism.
It's apocalyptic in nature, doom and gloom.
It's the worst possible.
There's no question that there was a template here, script or what have you.
10,000 body bags, all of these things.
And then you have this massive request for aid that New Orleans has made yet again after getting in the queue first last week.
So no, your suspicions are perfectly grounded in common sense, sir.
You are simply doing what I do, using your intelligence guided by experience in analyzing.
I mean, this is nothing new.
We were going to need how many body bags for the first Gulf War?
Sam Donaldson said, what, 50,000 body bags?
We didn't have a chance.
If you listen to the American media, the American left, this country doesn't have a chance.
We are the focus of evil in the modern world.
And not only do we don't have a chance to win and beat bad guys, we are the bad guys we deserve to lose.
And I frankly think that there's a lot of disappointment out there that it wasn't as bad that they said it was.
But they're not going to go back and correct the record.
They will not go back and correct.
They will not even go back under the auspices.
Hey, folks, we've got good news for you.
It wasn't nearly as bad as everybody thought.
Not going to do that.
Because the template has already been written and the execution of that template and that news cycle is underway.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back.
Stay with us.
And as I scan the news, there are many stories.
I just grew up too soon.
I was born too soon.
Where were the governors like Sonny Perdue when I was in school, junior, high, and high school?
Sonny Perdue, the governor of Georgia, has closed school there today and tomorrow to save 500,000 gallons of diesel fuel.
What a guy.
What a guy.
This is a bad move.
The parents are going to hate this guy.
It's bad enough to have the kids around all day in the summertime.
School comes along and you throw a party because the kids and the rugrats and the crumb crunchers are leaving and going back to school.
Now you got two days of them back in September when you're not mentally or emotionally prepared for it to save 500,000 gallons of diesel fuel.
I didn't even get out for 15 inches of snow.
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