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Oct. 3, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:15
October 3, 2005, Monday, Hour #3
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Time Text
I know Altamont.
It's showtime.
I know what the theme means.
I'm just going through some last minute things here.
Greetings and welcome, my friend.
Welcome back to the award-winning thrill packed ever exciting, increasingly popular, growing by leaps and bounds, Rush Limbaugh program.
Great to have you with us.
The telephone number 800-282-2882, the email address is Rush at EIB net.com.
All right, so the uh the choice of Harriet Myers is out there.
We had Vice President Cheney on the program exactly one hour ago.
Uh that uh transcript of the interview posted uh now at Rush Limbaugh.com and a number of uh networks have called and asked for permission to use excerpts from it, uh, which we granted.
And uh I'm sure there will be uh more media requests uh as the uh afternoon and the days ahead unfold.
Uh we've pretty much uh discussed this from the beginning to the end of it uh in terms of what we know now, so let's just let if you're just joining us, let's sum up where we are.
Uh we have a pick that is basically stealth.
The only person who knows enough about this person uh to be confident is the president.
This, because the the president's supporters sometimes feel that he pays more attention to his enemies than his supporters, has a lot of people worried.
Conservatives have worked for 30, 40, 50 years to elect a Republican president along with the Republican House and a Republican Senate.
One of the express reasons for that was to set up this very circumstance to uh select justices for the Supreme Court, which would change the direction of the court.
There are many uh well-qualified people, uh sitting sitting judges, about whom a judicial philosophy is well known.
It's etched in stone.
They were not chosen.
Harriet Myers, uh an associate of the president's in his uh White House counsel's office, who also set up the um interviews and actually part of the prime mover in the selection process of a number of judicial candidates from the appellate courts to the district courts all the way up through the Roberts nomination.
Uh she was she was the go-to person in uh in that job in that office.
Uh and much like Vice President Cheney was chosen, uh, as he was screening vice presidential candidates, so the president today has chosen Harriet Myers, about whom we have learned as uh uh a devout Christian.
Uh maybe even true to say that she's an evangelical Christian, uh, is a literalist on the Bible.
Supporters and friends of hers in Texas are saying that's how she views the Constitution.
The problem for many of the president's supporters is, and I asked the Vice President about this, it's why do we have to roll a dice?
We have plenty of people out there about whom this is known.
And the Vice President said, Trust me on this, Rush, you're you're gonna like this choice.
She's uh she's got an excellent judicial philosophy as an originalist and so forth and so on.
So we've been as as we are wont to do here, speculating on the uh on the on the purpose of the choice and and why.
Uh and there are there are a number of possibilities.
Now I know that many of you out there on the uh on the side of the president really want the fight uh for the longest time in your lives, and I'm with you on this.
You get you're just sick of the left and you want them nailed.
And we see them floundering.
We don't see them on a position of ascendance uh with ascendancy.
We we don't see them as dominant in America.
We don't live in Washington, where there's a can obviously a completely different view on the uh on the power and the strength of the left inside the uh beltway culture.
But those of us that don't live there, look at the left as a floundering bunch of uh extremists and activists who are who are becoming kookier and kookier and kookier and who are uh slowly dominating the Democratic Party.
They have no agenda.
Uh and they're totally emotional and irrational, and as such, it's time to nail them.
It is it is time to take the fight to them.
If they want to filibuster, let them filibuster.
This could be uh a fight the White House really doesn't want at this time.
Maybe the White House objective is to actually get somebody on the court that the President knows will change the direction of the court as he wants it, as he has said he wants to do.
Uh as I said last hour, if you're gonna go to war, you I mean you go to War, you only you only go to war when you can win, folks.
And if you if if you're gonna go to war and it's something like this, do you want your army to be the Senate Republicans?
It could well be, and I'm just speculating here.
Uh it could well be that the White House looks at the army that they have, the Republicans in the Senate.
We I can't I can't guarantee it's gonna be 51 votes there at the end of the day on a Michael Luttig or an Edith Jones or a Janice Rogers Brown or I Priscilla Owen.
I don't know that I don't know that the uh Senate Republicans will hold.
So what good's having the fight if you lose it?
Uh and by losing it, I mean you may cream the lift uh in terms of public opinion, but you may not get your choice confirmed at the same time.
The objective is to get the choice confirmed.
The objective is to change the direction of the court.
Now, that's a huge if, and you know me, I'm not I'm not a bigger believer in ifs, ifs are for children, but that's about all we have here.
That and the uh the trust that we want to place in the uh in the White House and in the president, that he has actually nominating somebody here who is in the image of uh Clarence Thomas and Anton and Scalia, as he said during the campaigns.
But I think it's it's clear that this this White House uh despite what they may think, does not come across as a White House willing to fight the liberals and willing to fight the left, but rather they're viewed as uh willing to appease them.
Uh to consider what they think and to make them think that they're part of the process.
Ted Kennedy writing the education bill, the president reaching out 70 Democrats on the Roberts Choice.
Uh there are countless other examples.
Uh one of the things that was most offensive to a number of people recently was the president's speech in New Orleans, in which he alluded to the fact that institutional racism played a role in the plight of many citizens in New Orleans in the aftermath and the lack of recovery, which of course we disagree with profoundly.
Institutional racism had nothing to do with the uh plight of people in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
But to say that is an attempt to uh uh win the minds and hearts of blacks, because that's what they think.
So, you know, I I'm not uh an expert on the political strategizing in the White House.
So I throw all this out simply as a possibility.
You might say I throw it out with some hope, but I'm not even doing that.
I'm just rummaging through possibilities to try to uh explain things.
I think the White House is aware that this pick has let people down.
I think they knew the pick would disappoint some people uh and they're doing their best here to rally the troops uh behind Harriet Myers uh for that reason.
And when you understand that, when you think the White House understands that they have to sell this to their own side, you see the basic problem that uh that that creeps up, uh, which it wouldn't be necessary to sell it to the base if a choice had been made of uh some known quantities out there about whom no questions uh would rise about whether or not we're rolling the dice and are we gonna get the kind of justice that we all want.
But this is all rooted uh in uh uh uh a an almost visceral reaction, natural and justified on the part of many conservatives, who have for their most of their lives had to listen to degrading insults and put downs uh and and impunations from the left about uh about our and their very existence.
And we're fed up with it, and many people think we're in a war.
And we are, for I may make no question, we are in a war with the American left.
We're not just fighting terrorists abroad, we're fighting the American left domestically.
And when it doesn't seem that the White House understands that or is willing to engage in it, then quite naturally there's going to be uh a lot of uh what depression, demoralization, anger, uh what have you.
So it is say this with with hope, I hope that their objective is their eye is on the objective and the end result here, and actually getting someone the president wants on the court confirmed.
And again, I hearken back.
I mean, it's easy to sit here and say we've got to go to war, we gotta take it to the libs, but you can't count on the Republicans in the Senate.
You just can't, depending on who the nominee is, you just can't count.
There are a lot of liberal moderate Republicans in the Senate who will bail.
Uh, And we've seen it.
I could give you names from issue to issue.
We've got Link Chafee, we've got Susan Collins, Olympia Snow, we got Mike DeWine from Ohio who bailed on the gang of 14.
We got Voinovich who bailed on Bolton.
There are Boinovich cries to the floor in the Senate.
You know, there hasn't been, and I, you know, you may be able to take this back to the White House, too.
There simply has not been enough party discipline in this White House to enforce and to make sure that this party is unified on uh on issues that resulted in all of these people being elected.
But things are what they are.
You deal with them as they are in reality and not as you wish they would be.
It is more than likely that uh Harriet Myers will be confirmed.
But again, there's a lot about her that we don't know, and I tr trust me on this, the Democrats are going to be out digging up whatever they can, because they don't know anything about her either.
And they're going to be worried the same thing that I've just told you, that this is a stealth nominee designed to accomplish exactly what the President wants without anybody knowing who she is.
And when they find out she's an evangelical Christian, when she finds out uh they find out she's a biblical literalist, they are going to panic.
Because that will mean something substantively to them.
It will scare them, and they will react accordingly.
They also have their fundraising to do, so despite what you've heard Harry Reed say about how much he loves Harriet Myers, how great she was to work with, and uh some of the other Democrats, they still have their fundraising to do, and they still have their Ralph Mises and uh uh uh Nan Ahrens and uh all these activist leaders to keep happy out there,
so they will say some things that uh will go against the uh the notion that's out there now that uh they love her, Harriet Myers, and that she's going to pretty much sail through.
Uh we'll take a brief time out and get back with uh more of your comments, we have more audio soundbites as well, and there are other things in the stack of stuff uh here, and I may get to them today, may not, but I'm gonna get to them because they deserve to be gotten to.
There's all kinds of stuff out there besides this.
And I've always pledged you not get sidetracked by a single issue uh from day to day, leaving other things on the table that uh we need to discuss.
So if you sit tight, we'll come back, phone calls next, and we'll roll on from there.
Before we go back to the phone, some audio soundbites, just for contrast and just to illustrate uh some differences.
Stephen Breyer, a sitting U.S. Supreme Court justice, appeared on a Sunday television show.
I I find that that by itself uh fascinating.
This isn't done.
MA said for an interview now and then, uh print interviews in legal journal, may go make a speech, but to uh go on a on a Sunday talk show, not not common.
Stephanopoulos said to Justice Breyer, and this is this is the justice by the way the thing, well, we ought to go.
If we have to f if we have to go to Mars to find uh law that we agree with, we uh we should do that.
He doesn't believe we should be constrained by the boundaries of U.S. law, nor the Constitution.
Stephanopoulos is probably the justice most known for textualism, originalism is Justice Scalia.
And he says, listen, we have to steer clear of intent.
We have to steer clear of looking at consequences.
We consequences are not our role.
We we have to pay attention to the text.
Uh your book, Justice Breyer, is looking in a very different situation.
It does look in a different direction.
But the main point of the book is to tell people who'd like to read it that basically when judges decide cases, not all, but many.
They must look back to basic purposes and consequences.
Those aren't the only things.
But I want to explain why I think it's necessary to do that, and that means that I have to explain originalism, textualism, why that doesn't, in my opinion, work very well.
So the guy's out hawking a book.
Well, that's just hunky dory.
It's that's just that's just peachy kid.
Nothing says he can't do it, but you just wonder about the uh propriety of it all.
So he says here uh originalism, textualism, that that doesn't work very well.
you might say, well, why doesn't it work very well?
Here's what he says.
Because in close cases, when you say go look at history, history doesn't tell you.
The people who wrote the Constitution really didn't think that there would be an Internet.
They went to Philadelphia Hall in carriages.
They went there with horses.
They didn't go there in automobiles.
They thought the Commerce Clause would apply in the future, but not just to horses.
And they thought it would they didn't dream of automobiles.
They didn't dream of television and they didn't dream of internet computers, all the things that affect our privacy, for example.
So there's not going to be a way to look back and say, what did Thomas Jefferson say about the application of the First Amendment to this particular instance or to most of modern society where you're talking about developments that didn't then exist?
This is so sad.
That is that is the miracle and the brilliance of the Constitution.
It does just that.
It is the Constitution.
Just as Breyer may think that you can't go back and interpret the original intent by the same token, Mr. Justice.
You can't tell us what they would have intended, which is what this view seeks to do.
It seeks to tell us what they would have intended had they envisioned automobiles or the internet or computers or some such thing.
The miracle and the brilliance of the of the Constitution is that it does.
It has not the it's it's the glue that has kept this country together by being loyal to it, by having fealty to its original intent.
And what is this business of Justice Breyer appropriating the right to enumerate powers for people?
Anything not in the Constitution is enumerated.
It's count it's it's a they they allowed for this.
They allowed for things that they didn't mention to be dealt with in specific ways.
And it's not it in the you will not find in the Constitution, where the founders wrote, and by the way, the things that we didn't think of here, the Supreme Court gets to decide.
They didn't say that.
They didn't even say the Supreme Court determines the constitutionality of laws.
The court decided that itself in Marbury versus Madison.
The big fear and the longtime concern of the court is that it's nine lawyers who wear black robes.
And this is a lot of power they've given themselves to determine the constitutionality of things, which was not in the original intents, not in the Constitution.
Well, if they can amass that kind of power and get egos the size of the country in terms of how they view their own importance to the future, it's no wonder that you get such bastardized rulings that have come out of these people.
And of course, this doesn't even talk about the states and their role in enumerated powers or enumerated rights.
So it's it's troubling to hear this, especially as he's out there now selling a book.
And I watched Diane Feinstein this morning outside her palatial mansion in Pacific Heights in San Francisco.
And she was being asked about Harriet Myers.
And she said, Well, I don't really know much about Harriet Myers.
So she started a recitation of what's wrong with the court.
She said her big concern, other than Roe v.
Wade, which is her number one concern, her big concern is a commerce clause.
She says the Supreme Court's telling us where we can and can't legislate.
And then she brought up the Commerce Clause.
She said, you know, this court told us that the Commerce the the Constitu Congress cannot rule that you can't have a gun a thousand feet or a thousand yards, whatever it is from a school.
Well, she said most Americans look at that at that's silly.
Do we want guns within a thousand feet?
Senator, if you don't want guns a thousand feet from schools, go to the local area, go to the state and have them deal with it, because the commerce clause does not give the U.S. Congress the right to pass that law.
The Supreme Court was right.
There's interstate commerce.
This is this is where these people who have an expansionist view will look at the Constitution and say, well, they would have never envisioned there would have been guns outside all these schools.
They of course would understand where we're trying to limit this.
No, they didn't.
They covered it clearly in the Constitution.
Interstate commerce, interstate commerce, is that commerce that goes on between the two states.
And that's what the Commerce Clause is all about.
Or between more than one state, not just two, but more than one.
But for Congress to say that a school district in California cannot have guns within a thousand feet of school is not the Commerce Clause is being illegally applied there.
Supreme Court was right to overturn that.
She doesn't get it.
She thought, well, that's silly.
We have to understand how silly that is, and Congress has the right to pass.
Not according to the Constitution.
It works when it's originally applied, folks.
You're listening to Rush Limbaugh on the excellence in podcasting network.
One more Stephen Breyer bite.
It's it's in, I should have played this consecutively with uh in fact, let's go back and play nine and ten together so that we get these consecutively.
This uh first soundbite is where Breyer explains how in his view, he's a justice on the Supreme Court that originalism doesn't work because we live in a different world than the one the framers lived in when they wrote the Constitution.
He does look in a different direction.
But the main point of the book is to tell people who'd like to read the remote.
No, no, no, no.
Mike, my nine, I want nine and ten here.
Let's play nine.
That was that's number uh that's number eight.
Let's do nine and ten consecutively here.
Start with number nine.
Because in close cases, when you say go look at history, the history doesn't tell you.
The people who wrote the Constitution really didn't think that there would be an Internet.
They went to Philadelphia Hall in carriages.
They went there with horses.
They didn't go there in automobiles.
They thought the Commerce Clause would apply in the future, but not just to horses.
And they thought it would they didn't dream of automobiles.
They didn't dream of television, and they didn't dream of internet, uh, computers, uh, all the things that affect our privacy, for example.
So there's not going to be a way to look back and say, what did Thomas Jefferson say about the application of the First Amendment to this particular instance or to most of modern society where you're talking about developments that didn't then exist.
Even Stephanopoulos has recognized this as bogus, but before I get to the next bite, this business of privacy, you know, that right's not specifically enumerated in the Constitution, Judge.
But but to think that the framers had no concept of it, to think because they didn't have television and they didn't dream of it and they didn't know about the internet.
Go back and look at the print media when these guys were writing the Constitution, I'm gonna tell you that the print media was all tabloid.
It was it was it was well, the vast majority of it was.
You think the media today is low down, dirty, rotten?
Whoa, folks, the things.
William Sapphire has written a great book about this, uh, a novel that's a historically accurate uh about one of these journalists named James Cavendurk uh Callender, C-A-L-L-E-N-D-A-R.
Uh, these people were vicious.
They're the founders knew full well what they were dealing with.
And yet they still created a free press.
So i i i th it's that's why the document is brilliant.
It's why it's a miracle.
But anyway, Stephanopoulos, he realizes that this idea that that that Breyer's talking about is not even in the Constitution.
The idea, well, we don't know what they were thinking, so we have to assume for them.
He says, I'm still having trouble figuring where specifically the idea you just talked about is based in the Constitution.
It's based in Articles one through seven.
They create a one through seven.
Yeah, that's the Constitution, and the rest is the amendments.
And what are the first three words of the Constitution?
We the people.
We the people.
That's right.
We the people, not we the states.
So not just omitted, but it's we the people that are creating the document.
And what kind of a document is it?
It is a document designed to create institutions that will allow people themselves to decide what their communities, what their states, what their towns, what their national government will be like, what rules do they want, what practices do they want to govern themselves?
Well, then, judge, why don't you vote to overturn Roe v.
Wade on the very basis of what you just said, because you're denying the people their right.
You are not the people.
That's the point.
You're not an elected body.
You serve lifetime terms.
There's no way of redress when people disagree with what you're doing.
The court has appropriated all of these decisions from the people.
It's incredible.
And let me give you the outgrowth.
We had the Kelo decision.
And eminent domain decision.
Everybody was outraged about this.
Try this.
This is this is from the Washington Times, but Mr. Sturgley, this is happening barely from where we sit as the crow flies.
Five miles north of here.
Riviera Beach in Florida is a poor, predominantly black coastal community that intends to revitalize its economy by using eminent domain, if necessary, to displace about 6,000 local residents and build a billion dollar waterfront yachting and housing complex.
Riviera Beach Mayor Michael Brown said this is a community that's in dire need of jobs, which has a median income of less than $19,000 a year.
He defends the use of eminent domain by saying that the city, quote, is using tools that have been available to governments for years to bring communities like ours out of the economic doldrums and the trauma centers.
Unquote.
Riviera Beach Mayor Michael Brown said that Riviera Beach is doing what the City of New London, Connecticut is trying to do, and what the U.S. Supreme Court said is proper in its ruling, June 23 in Kelo versus the city of New London.
That decision upheld the right of government to seize private properties for use by private developers for projects designed to generate jobs and increase the tax base.
So tell me, Justice Breyer, where is it and is in this ruling in the Kelo ruling that the people have anything to say about what's happening?
You've just empowered government here with this ruling, and he voted for Kilo.
So to listen to him here talk about, well, the founders didn't account for this, they didn't account for that.
It's written by we the people, we the you are not we the people.
That's the whole point.
The judicial branch is not we the people.
And if you go read the Federalist Papers, and if you go read the Constitution, you will find how very little was said about the court in terms of its importance, at least as the court has uh amassed importance for itself.
So you've got six thousand local residents right up the road from here in Riviera Beach, poor predominantly black, and from the sounds of it, the mayor just wants to sort of sweep them away somewhere and uh put in a big marina, get a bigger tax base, revive the economy from out of the doldrums up there.
And he's citing uh he's citing kilo as his uh reason for doing it.
Stephen Rockford, Illinois, I'm glad you waited, sir.
Welcome to the EIB network.
Hello.
Tremendous thrill to be on the program, Russ.
There are two points I'd like to make about Bush, and I think if you put them together you'll wind up being very optimistic.
The first point is that this is not a man who plays small ball on big issues.
He doesn't settle for field goals, he goes all the way if it's something that's really important.
And he's made the Supreme Court really important.
And the second thing is that when he has appointed somebody to a position who he knows very well, the point the appointment has been superb.
Cheney and Rice, for example.
I am very pleased that he is appointed somebody who he knows better than everybody else.
I take it to mean he wants to make sure that he doesn't have somebody who's going to turn on him, somebody who he knows is going to accomplish what he feels is so important.
I appreciate your view on that.
Uh the Democrats out there saying it's cronyism, which means that he's simply picking friends without any any concern for what they're going to do.
He's just rewarding cronies.
That's their mantra as we speak today at the at this moment.
Now that mantra will change, uh, the media has picked up that mantra and is running around asking about is this simply cronyism.
To believe that it's cronyism, you have to believe the president doesn't care what this woman's going to do on the court.
He's just rewarding her.
And uh you'd have to believe that uh uh uh as a follow-up uh that the court is not a place for this kind of patronage.
Uh but yet that some people think that that's all he thinks about.
Now, the court, hey man, this is the best job I can give a friend of mine.
I think it does sell him short uh to look at it that way.
To say this is cronyism is um That's a stab in the dark.
Uh regardless what you might think of President Bush.
I don't think he has that little regard for the Supreme Court.
Burton's Maryland.
Hello, Dave.
I'm glad you called your next.
Good afternoon, Rush.
I'm a little bit nervous here, so be patient with me.
Yes, sir.
I kind of feel like you are locked step in line, backing George Bush.
And I kind of have a feeling that he knew that guys like you would provide cover for him and would not hold his feet to the fire as you should.
I mean, listening to the program today.
Dave, have you have have you been listening to the program today?
Certainly.
I thought I listened that you gave him a pass.
I mean, it's true.
You said you were neutral on her.
I understand that.
But this is an opportunity for you to say, you know what?
I started out by saying that what bothers me is this is a pick that comes from a position of weakness.
I grilled the vice president on why didn't you choose people that we know we could count on instead of having to wait 10 years.
Where were you?
This is just a no-win situation.
Sir, I've got the whole of the mainstream press one to interview me today.
You know why?
Because they think I've criticized the White House.
You know what?
If you call that criticism, my God, I I would love to have enemies like you.
Rush, I I love you, but I I'm just I'm so frustrated.
This was a great opportunity for you to say, you know what?
This is the last straw from George Bush.
He has sold us down the river time after time after time.
And this is this was his opportunity to say, you know what?
Let's do a little test.
Another another slap in the street.
Wait a second.
Wait a second.
Hold that a minute.
Hold it just a second.
Let's do a little test.
Let's do a little test here.
You pret you pretend you're me.
And I want you to pretend you're me and say, okay, this is the last straw.
Bush has done it.
Now what do we do?
He hung up?
No.
He hung up.
Seminar is there.
I'm right here.
Okay.
Okay.
So you pretend that you're me.
And all right, this is the last straw.
Now what do we do?
I don't have the an answer to that.
You know what?
Just tell the truth.
The truth is that this is the last straw.
We are now going to start supporting conservative Republicans in the primaries, which I don't think you you particularly do.
And not that you support liberals.
I'm just saying you you you kind of give a pass to all the Republicans.
And you know, say, you know, we're going to turn a corner here.
We're now going to support conservatives in office.
What's wrong with that?
This this makes me think of retirement sooner than later.
If after eighteen years.
I know he's emotional, but and I understand that.
But if after 18 years, uh I accused of selling out the conservative movement, essentially.
Well, no, I don't think he is a seminar caller, Mr. Snurdley.
I don't I I think I think there is there's a there's a level of rage out there that is just fed up.
I understand it totally.
The point is, okay, what do you do?
If you're fed up that's that's that's the last Bush has three years left.
Who you gonna support in O in 08, McCain?
Who you gonna what are we what do we do out there?
Yeah, well, I could have backed Perroia if I were conservative.
But no, this is this is not the way to uh to look at this.
You get the these disappointments happen consistently.
I remember the first day after Clinton was elected.
I could have caved then.
I could have said, it's over, folks.
I'm gonna go home and I'm gonna enjoy the rest of my life, and the rest of you are on your own.
I mean, if you if you're gonna cave and you say this is a last straw, then you better have another drink to start stirring.
And if you don't have another drink to start stirring, don't talk to me.
Actually, it feels good to laugh today.
I was just scouring the email, and uh, you know, I had the news out uh earlier today from a website that from a from a member of her church at Harriet Myers is a devout uh Christian, evangelical Christian, so I got a sort of a testy email from someone saying, Hey, Harriet Myers is so loyal to Christ, what's she doing running the Texas Lottery Commission?
Speaking of imminent domain and uh Riviera Beach, have you seen the Washington Post today?
Ninth ward history.
Yes, but is there a future?
The ninth ward is the poorest section of New Orleans, was underwater quite a long time.
It's by C C Connolly in the Washington Post.
No one here wants to say it aloud, but one day soon the bulldozers will come, shoving away big hunks of a neighborhood known for its poverty, its artists, its bad luck, and its bounce back resilience.
A neighborhood tucked into a deep depression between two canals, railroad tracks in the Mississippi River, New Orleans lower ninth ward has spent more of the past five weeks underwater than dry.
Entire houses knocked off foundations, barbershops and corner groceries flattened, cars tossed inside living rooms.
What remains is coated in muck, a crusty layer of canal water, sewage and dirt.
Mold is rapidly devouring interiors.
The question now is whether the Lower Ninth Ward, which was devastated forty years ago by Hurricane Betsy, should be resuscitated again.
The debate, as fervent as any facing post-Hurricane New Orleans, will test this city's mettle and is sure to expose tensions over race, poverty, and political power.
The people willing to let the lower ninth fade away hue to a pragmatist bottom line.
The ones who want it to stay talk of culture and tradition.
So, what are we doing here?
Sum this up very simply.
We are debating whether or not to rebuild a liberal created ghetto.
We are debating whether or not to recreate the you know, and I said this when this hurricane happened and we started talking about rebuilding.
They're not going to rebuild these devastated areas exactly as they were.
They're not going to put up ramshackle shacks to replace the ramshackle shacks.
Would you?
But I guess there's a no, we should.
We should have was part of the charm in the culture.
Well, now you've got to decide, uh, liberals.
You either want poverty or you don't.
Unbelievable story.
So in uh Riviera Beach, Florida, the mayor there just wants to sweep 6,000 poor blacks out of town and make a marina out of the community where they live and uh in New Orleans, what to do about the Lower Ninth Ward.
They'll figure out a way to use eminent domain there too once they get everything put back together.
Excuse me, mentally.
Here's Barbara in uh Ruidoso, Minnesota.
Nice to have you with us.
Yes, hi.
Uh, I just wanted uh my my phone batteries are getting lost off there quickly.
I just wanted to caution my fellow conservatives not to get stuck on stupid.
Uh I people jumped immediately against Robert when when he first came out, and and it turned totally turned around.
And the other thing is we are doing the same thing the Democrats are, and that is we're underestimating Bush.
And everybody does it.
And I think that we need to we need to slow down and not get stuck on winning the battle and losing the war.
I think he's more interested in winning the war.
Well, I that I agree with that.
That's another way of saying, do you go to war with the Senate Republicans as your army?
You pick your spots.
Uh look, you you you have a good point about people underestimating Bush and waiting for the worst.
There is a lot of pessimism out there.
But I have to tell you one thing, just so you know, Barbara and the rest of you.
Do not make the mistake thinking that the conservative movement is monolithic.
There are many facets.
There's uh we have an elite, we have our run of the mill, we have the middle class, there's a whole bunch of conservatives out there now.
And if you think that there is 100% support of John Roberts in the conservative community, you are wrong.
There are people in the conservative judicial legal community who are still holding their breath about Roberts for the same reasons they're giving about Harriet Myers.
They don't know anything about him.
And they had the same criticism of Roberts that they have of uh Myers.
Why, you had all these great guys out there with these great records and wouldn't have to roll the dice.
We don't know anything about John Roberts.
He's been on a circuit court two years.
We don't know anything about him.
Still reverberating out there.
And now with Harriet Myers, this is the second one that some conservatives are looking at through this prism.
So don't think just because of his appearance before the Judiciary Committee that he has uh he's won over every conservative.
Uh that that didn't happen.
Quick timeout.
Gotta go because of the constraints of time.
Be right back.
Okay, folks, that's it.
Now remember, there's going to be a lot bubbling up from all this in the uh in the days to come, so keep your powder dry out there, and uh don't be hastily jumping to a bunch of conclusions.
You have to be plenty of time for that later on with more information.
See you tomorrow.
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