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Oct. 6, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:20
October 6, 2005, Thursday, Hour #1
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Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Oh, That's a silly argument.
Anyway, it's just a bunch of eggheads talking among themselves.
This whole elitist business, it misses the point.
I don't know how I can be any more crystal clear on this.
And it's getting to point people are getting tired of hearing about it.
But duty is duty.
Greetings.
And my friends, Rush Limbaugh, Howard Dean.
Howard Dean says that Bush has got to know where to hide the salami, and he obviously has no clue what that means.
Talking about Harriet Myers, Al Gore called me a hate monger in a speech on the media.
And Mort Kondracki on Fox yesterday, after I gave him credit for a pretty funny line, called me stupid.
So it's the average day here, folks, and we're off and running the Rush Limbaugh program and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Looking forward to talking to you today as always.
Telephone number is 800-282-2882.
The email address rush at EIBnet.com.
Well, the president came out of the blocks today on fire with a speech reminding the American people about the war on terror and its importance.
He did not say, I'm working as hard as I can.
I'm working harder than I ever have to protect the American people.
And he did not say, I want to support that war before I don't want to support that war.
What he said was, we will win.
And because of that determination, we will.
The only question is, will the victory be apparent in a year or will it take a decade or whatever?
But there's certainly no backing down and backing off.
And there are, I don't know how long this speech that the president gave this morning has been scheduled.
I assume it's been scheduled for a while, but maybe not.
I don't know.
Oh, it was supposed to go a month before the hurricanes and they pushed it back.
So it's been on a schedule for quite a while.
But the timing is still interesting because there's so much fallout on this Harriet Myers business, nomination to the Supreme Court, that the one area that conservatives have remained united behind George W. Bush throughout his term is the war.
The war on terror and the war in Iraq, which today he says the same thing, which is something he's been trying to say and inform people of for five years now or four.
And he made the point again.
We have audio sound bites from that speech that we will be treating you to.
We've got, I mean, we're just, we're loaded today, folks.
It's just the nature of the beast.
I've got to share this little email with you, though.
It's from a 14-year-old boy in Devon, Pensaconia, in Pensacola, Florida.
His name is Devin.
He says, hi, Rush.
My name's Devin.
I'm 14 years old.
I think this death with dignity is a crock.
Doesn't anyone have the guts to tell the truth?
Why let grandpa spend $500,000 in a retirement home?
We can go to Aruba and Cancun.
I'm only 14.
Duh.
I love my grandparents and my parents, and no one's going to juice them unless they get past me.
Get away.
14-year-old Devin in Pensacola, Florida.
I love my parents and grandparents, and no one's going to juice them unless they get past me.
Interesting story that cleared the wires last night for the newspapers today in the Washington Post.
Just unbelievable.
The Senate defied, especially this story comes out prior to Bush making this barn burner stem winder of his speech today.
The Senate defied the White House yesterday and voted to set new limits on interrogating detainees in Iraq and elsewhere, underscoring Congress's growing concerns about reports of abuse of suspected terrorists and others in military custody.
46, 46 backbone of America Republicans joined 43 backbone of America Democrats and one backbone of America Independent in voting to define and limit interrogation techniques that U.S. troops may use against terrorism suspects.
This is the latest sign that alarm over treatment of prisoners in the Middle East and at Club Guitmo is widespread in both parties.
The White House had fought to prevent these restrictions.
Vice President Cheney visited key Republicans in July, and a spokesman yesterday repeated President Bush's threat to veto the larger bill that the language is now attached to, which is a $440 billion military spending measure.
Can you believe who would have thought that four years after 9-11 in the midst of the war on terror that this would be a priority of the U.S. Senate?
Now, I want to touch on something else here, folks.
Mark Levin, as you know, is the legal advisor here at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
And he also regularly posts commentary at National Review Online.
And this that he sent me, and I want to share a part of this with you because it's also about the Senate Republicans, and it dovetails one of the comments I've been making about the Harriet Myers situation.
And I've, you know, people, you know, I've said so much about this.
I don't know how I can be misunderstood.
And I've said it so articulately and so clearly.
I've made it plain.
I have no brief against this woman.
And I've even allowed for the possibility the president chose her because choosing a known quantity would cause such a battle that he just doesn't trust the army of Senate Republicans that he would need to get such a candidate confirmed, such a nominee confirmed.
And this piece by Levin touches on that, and this is going to be posted at National Review Online sometime soon, sometime this afternoon.
It will be posted there, and you'll be able to read it on your own.
But he basically mentions that there are two primary arguments for Harriet Myers by those close to the president.
The president knows her.
This is the first argument.
President knows her, believes she's the best candidate.
We should trust him because his past judicial picks have been good and excellent.
And the second primary argument is that there aren't enough Republican votes in the Senate to win an ideological fight over a nominee like Michael Lutig or Edith Jones or Janice Rogers Brown.
Now, everybody's addressed the first point on this, but the second point, there aren't enough Republicans.
The second point is what I've been telling you about, the Senate Army.
I mean, if Bush wants to go to war, we want him to go to war, but look at the army he's got.
And this is what Levin touches on.
The second argument about the impotence of the Senate Republicans is worth some discussion, too.
And this is where this gets really interesting.
The fact is that this gang of 14 moderates, led by Senator McCain, did make it much more difficult for the president to win an ideological battle over Supreme Court nominee.
The Democrats did, in fact, send warnings they were prepared to filibuster the second nominee.
And under such circumstances, the president would have needed 60 votes to confirm his candidate, not 51.
Now, lest we forget, Majority Leader Bill Frist and the overwhelming majority of his Republican colleagues were poised to defeat this unprecedented and frequently used or threatened filibuster tactic that had been unleashed against President Bush by the Democrats to weaken his appointment power.
The big media editorialized against it.
George Will wrote at length against it.
Now, this is where this gets interesting is what Levin thinks.
George Will wrote against doing away with the filibuster.
The big media editorialized against doing away with the filibuster or going to the nuclear option.
George Will himself wrote at length against the nuclear option.
And Bill Crystal's favorite presidential candidate in 2000, John McCain, the leader of the gang of 14, was all over the media making clear that he would torpedo the nuclear option should it be triggered.
And that's exactly what he did.
Now, this in no way excuses the president's blunder in choosing Myers, but the ideological confrontation with the likes of Senators Chumer and the Democrat left that many of us believe is essential, including now George Will and Bill Kristol, was made much more difficult thanks to the likes of McCain and the unwillingness to change the rule before any Supreme Court vacancy arose.
The president has been poorly served by his Republican allies, the Senate Army, in this regard.
Bush is the first president who's had to deal with an assault of this kind on his constitutional authority.
And unless and until the filibuster rule is changed, i.e., the nuclear option is triggered, a liberal minority in the Senate will have the upper hand, as they continue to have here, in the sense that they've intimidated an ideological choice in being made.
Today, the president would have to persuade seven of the most unreliable Republican senators to trigger this nuclear option in order to clear the way for an up or down vote for, say, a Lutig or an Edith Jones.
It's not at all certain or even likely that Lincoln Chafee, Olympia Snow, and or Susan Collins, the most liberal of the seven, would have voted for the Senate rule change for the purpose of confirming a solid originalist nominee anyway.
And it's likely the Democrat leadership would have succeeded in convincing at least some, if not most, of the seven Democrat moderates on this gang of 14 to oppose the rule change or to stand up against the nuclear option being triggered.
Levin says, I have no doubt that this was part of the White House's political calculation, and it's possible the president didn't want to limp into this fight with this Senate Republican army.
Levin thinks that's no excuse, but McCain, who wants to be president and has now endorsed Harriet Myers and his cadre, must not escape scrutiny for their blunder in this.
And while it's fine and dandy for people like George Will and Bill Crystal to come along and get mad at the nomination, they've opposed the triggering of the nuclear option.
And of course, Bill Crystal's favorite presidential candidates, John McCain.
So, you know, I told you at the outset here that this Senate Army was a problem for the president.
He is unprecedented that the president has to deal with defections in his own party over something like this.
And there's no doubt it was part of the political calculation.
So you'll be able to read this in its entirety at National Review Online.
It'll be on what's called The Corner.
They've got a bunch of blogs there, but you'll be able to read what's on the corner when it gets posted later this afternoon.
Anyway, you couple that, couple that reality with the fact here that four years after 9-11, the Senate, 43 Republicans and 46 Republicans, 43 Democrats, main priority is to pass a law limiting the scope of interrogation and the type of techniques in the midst of the war on terror.
It's just, it's unfathomable to me.
And it's what you get with a bunch of Ivy Leaguers, folks.
It's what you get with a bunch of elitists who think they're all better than anybody else at determining how we do things.
You combine these senators with the judges that think they all ought to be running a war on terror, and it's a wonder that we haven't been hit again.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back.
Stay with us.
We have some audio soundbites of the president's speech that he gave about two hours ago coming up in just a moment.
I want to get some things out of the way first.
One of the great things he said in this speech, this was, you know, this speech was delivered in real language.
And he talked about bin Laden and how he gets all of these young, impressionable Muslim kids and turns them into raving terrorists blowing themselves up all on the promise that they are going to end up in paradise.
And he says, it's interesting that old Osama's never along for the ride, which a line that I just absolutely love.
But I want to get this stuff out of the way here first.
The whole argument about Harriet Myers and whether or not the opposition to her stems from Republican conservative elitism.
There are a couple of private meetings in Washington yesterday.
The word leaked out about them.
The New York Times, Washington Post has them.
Historians, Ed Gillespie and some other Republicans in the White House, went over there meeting with these groups.
One was Grover Norquist group, the other Paul Weirich's group.
And apparently the fur flew and the newspaper accounts don't really do justice.
And what really caused the fur to fly was when Gillespie went up there, you guys are just opposed because you're a bunch of elitists and she's not one of you.
And they, I mean, it hit the fan.
Gillespie needed security.
They just didn't hint that this whole elitist argument, and it stems from White House supporters of the president and Harriet Myers.
And this whole topic came up for discussion last night in the roundtable on special report with Britt Hume, who said, our colleague George Will lacks enthusiasm for Harriet Myers, as does Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Laura Ingram, and the former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, not to mention David Frum.
What do they all have in common?
They're products of the most prestigious Eastern schools.
Some observations from Fred Barnes, a graduate of the University of Virginia, as indeed I am, Mort Kondracki of Dartmouth, and Mara Lyason, a graduate, dare I say, of Brown.
Is there a bit of elitism in all this?
And this is the answer to the question Fred Barnes leading off.
Snobbery even.
Go ahead, Fred.
All those people you mentioned are all friends of mine.
They're people who I admire, who I always read their columns.
But David Frum says, for instance, that she's not good enough for the job.
And she will remain not good enough even if she votes the right way.
I think for most conservatives, if she votes the right way, she will be exactly the person who they want on the court.
But somehow they've gotten all tied up in this idea that she doesn't have the right credentials.
She hasn't written a lot of bedazzlingly intellectual opinions.
Up next was Mort Kondracki.
One of the main critics of Ms. Myers is Rush Limbaugh, who dropped out of Southeastern Missouri State College.
Does that make him the exception as a rule?
Michelle Malkin, who's a big critic, went to Oberlin.
I didn't hear this.
I wasn't watching the program last night, but I was paying bills.
I have to do that every day.
I get so many.
And when it was first presented to me, did you hear how Mark Kondracki slammed you yesterday?
Kondracki really slammed you.
He said you're an uneducated boob that you quit college after a year.
And now that I hear this, I'm not sure that's what I think.
I think he was trying to counter the notion it's a bunch of elitists.
Hey, wait a minute, Limbaugh's against her too, and this guy dropped out of college.
How can you call him an elitist?
But if, okay, there's giving him the, okay, okay, okay, okay, all right.
Snurdley thinks I'm being too generous.
I'm an optimist.
All right, so I've been generous.
I've got a response if he meant it the other way, if he was calling me an idiot.
It's very simple.
Hey, Mort, let me tell you something.
More people have heard what you just said on this program that'll hear you in five months of nightly appearances on that show.
And if you're kind to me in the future, Mort, I will send my airplane up to get you and bring you down to my estate for some golf and some fun times on the beach here.
If you're nice to me in the future.
Yeah, I dropped out of college after a year.
I knew what I wanted to do.
When I was in high school, all they told me was when you get to college, you're on your own.
They're going to treat you like an adult.
They don't call a role or anything.
If you cut class, that's your problem.
So fine, I get to college.
I call a roll in every class.
I flunked speech.
I flunked speech twice.
Gave every speech I was supposed to give.
Been doing speeches since I was 15.
I didn't outline the speeches.
So I flunked the courses.
They should have called it Outlining 101, not speech 101.
And then my assigned, my required PE course, Dawn, Ballroom Dance, taught by a former drill sergeant in the wax.
I knew then that this was not for me.
And so I joined the ranks of many who didn't finish college, among them Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
And I make no excuses for it.
But I don't think it has anything to do with qualifications to comment on something like this anyway.
But I'm still not sure that Kondracki was engaging in a total slam here.
Because the premise of his whole argument was that it's a bunch of elitists that oppose Harriet Myers.
And I don't qualify as any kind of an Ivy Leaguer or any kind of an elitist if educational credentials are the way you measure that.
Fred Barnes then tried to wrap all this up and said this.
I think the right wing wanted war.
They wanted Armageddon.
They wanted to.
For its own sake?
Sure.
I mean, what Rush Limbaugh says is the Democrats are on the ropes.
Their last bastion was the courts.
We're going to take over the courts.
We want somebody we can cow down.
We want somebody distinguished and well-known.
And we're going to take over this.
He got that right.
No problem with that.
Here's Barnes now.
That's different, though.
There are two strands of complaint.
There's this elitist strand of people who don't think she measures up.
She's not intellectual enough.
And that's the ones we've talked about.
And some of them did go to Harvard and Yale and maybe Brown and Dartmouth as well.
But then there's the conservatives represented by Rush Limbaugh who don't know enough about her and worry that she'll be a Kennedy, an O'Connor, or a suitor.
I've not even said that.
That's the one thing I don't know any about her, but I've never mentioned Souter or a Kennedy or an O'Connor per se in her instance.
I have other reasons.
And I've been as clear as anyone can be on them.
I got to take a break.
We'll come back and we'll move on to the president's speech.
It was good.
Stay with me.
You're listening to Rush Limbaugh on the Excellence in Podcasting Network.
On the cutting edge of societal evolution, Rush Limbaugh, America's anchorman, seated firmly here at the prestigious Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
The telephone number 800-282-2882.
All right, Rush, well, what have you said if it's so clear?
What have you said?
I've said that the primary thing that concerned me about the nomination was that it looks like it's coming from a position of weakness and unwillingness to have the battle.
And my fear is that the appearance of weakness, when your enemies perceive that you are weak, it emboldens them and they are ripe to be trounced.
It had nothing to do with she's going to be another suitor.
She's going to be another Kennedy because I don't know, which I've also said.
I don't have these cliched fears.
My thoughts are unique to me.
I don't take them from anybody else.
And I don't join the pack in running around with all these clichés that everybody else has.
She's going to be another suitor.
She's kind of another Kennedy.
That doesn't matter.
I mean, we can't possibly know that.
She could be fine in the end, which is, I've also said this.
I've got no brief against her.
She's a human being and she's an accomplished woman.
It was a missed opportunity.
But it really bugs me, folks.
It bugs me when you strengthen, when you empower your enemy, when you embolden them, and especially when they're on the ropes, when they're driving off the cliff and you reach into their truck and put on the brakes, is what bothers me.
Let them drive.
Let them keep driving over the cliff.
Oh, no, no, no.
We got to save them.
All right.
I don't know how to make it any more clear than that.
So even Brian understands, yep, nodding his head, he gets it.
So I would expect the rest of you to be totally on board.
All right, let's go to the audio soundbites.
Just teasing, Brian.
I love teasing the staff, folks.
What are they going to do about it?
Here is President Bush.
We have some soundbites from his really fine speech this morning.
And you're listening to the media guys, media analysts.
You know, the president just seems off his game.
President seems distracted.
President seems nervous.
It's just the opposite.
He was on fire in this speech, and this is one of the best speeches he's given since the post-9-11 speech that he delivered to the country.
Osama bin Laden has called on Muslims to dedicate, quote, their resources, sons, and money to driving the infidels out of their lands.
Their tactic to meet this goal has been consistent for a quarter century.
They hit us and expect us to run.
They want us to repeat the sad history of Beirut in 1983 and Mogadushu in 1993.
Stop the tape a minute, Mayor Aldermont.
That's see, it's about time for this.
Mogadishu in 1993 is Bill Clinton.
And bin Laden himself has cited that as evidence that we wouldn't take casualties and that we're weak and that we can be had because our people don't have the guts to put up with pictures of casualties on television.
And Bush is simply saying, I'm not making these mistakes.
We are not cutting and running.
I'm not getting out of there.
You can stop thinking about it and you can stop talking about it.
This time on a larger scale with greater consequences.
Now they set their sights on Iraq.
Bin Laden has stated the whole world is watching this war and the two adversaries.
It's either victory and glory or misery and humiliation.
The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity.
And we must recognize Iraq as the central front in our war on terror.
Now, this is another great bite coming up.
This is the kind of thing that all of us who support the president have been saying, but he hasn't said it until today.
He makes the point, all these people that are running around on the left, from the Cindy Sheehans to the rest of them, all claiming that Iraq has caused more terrorism.
He confronts it head on.
The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue.
And it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse.
The government of Russia did not support Operation Iraqi Freedom.
And yet militants killed more than 180 Russian schoolchildren in Beslan.
Over the years, these extremists have used a litany of excuses for violence.
Israeli presence on the West Bank or the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia.
Or the defeat of the Taliban.
Or the crusades of a thousand years ago.
In fact, we're not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed.
We can't talk to them.
We're facing a radical ideology with inalterable objectives to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world.
This next bite, this has the line that I loved in it.
Listen to this.
Like the ideology of communism, Islamic radicalism is elitist.
Stop the tape for just a second.
Now, it's about time that the isms got repeated here.
This is the new communism.
Communism, and this comparison is right on the money.
This is the way to illustrate exactly what we face for these.
And it is worldwide.
It's not just contained in the Middle East.
It's going on in the Philippines.
It goes on in Bali.
Bali got hit again.
Goes on in Spain.
Goes on in London.
Happened in Washington, D.C.
It is worldwide.
Led by a self-appointed vanguard that presumes to speak for the Muslim masses.
Bin Laden says his own role is to tell Muslims, quote, what is good for them and what is not.
And what this man who grew up in wealth and privilege considers good for poor Muslims is that they become killers and suicide bombers.
He assures them that this is the road to paradise, though he never offers to go along for the ride.
Yeah, that's just, that's, I mean, that's this plain language that everybody can understand.
Here's more.
No act of ours invited the rage of the killers.
And no concession, bribe, or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder.
On the contrary, they target nations whose behavior they believe they can change through violence.
Against such an enemy, there is only one effective response.
We will never back down, never give in, and never accept anything less than complete victory.
Rado, rado, rado.
Now, what this bite that you just heard is, he didn't say it, but this is a refutation of every point that the left makes.
Hey, we just need to talk to these people.
Hey, hey, you know, we can appease them.
We can talk.
We caused this.
Our actions as Americans, we caused this.
We deserve this to happen.
Everything that you're hearing on the left, all the looniness from the left, he dealt with in this one bite.
In fact, I got a note from my mistress in Georgia this morning who was watching the speech.
She said, this is great.
This sounds like you wrote this speech.
This sounds like you giving the speech.
And I was going, rah-rah.
That's exactly right.
Yeah, I mean, and it's about time.
Now, the president says that we have, and this is the press is harping on this, folks.
After the speech was over, all the media said, oh, really?
We're going to do our own research.
We're going to do our own fact-checking.
We're going to find out about this.
Here's what the president said.
Overall, the United States and our partners have disrupted at least 10 serious al-Qaeda terrorist plots since September the 11th, including three al-Qaeda plots to attack inside the United States.
We've stopped at least five more al-Qaeda efforts to case targets in the United States or infiltrate operatives into our country because of the steady progress the enemy has wounded.
But the enemy is still capable of global operations.
Yeah, well, this is this is it's funny to watch the media after this because that's the one segment of this.
They zeroed it.
What?
Thwarted attacks.
Is he making this up?
We haven't heard anything about this.
Somebody said, well, wait a minute.
We haven't been attacked since 9-11.
Well, that's true.
That's true.
But we're not about this thwarted stuff.
So they're busy right now trying to find out what the president was talking about because they think he made it up.
It was the impression I got.
And he reminds everybody here, it's going to be difficult.
It'll require sacrifices, but freedom will prevail because it must.
Throughout history, tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that murder is justified to serve their grand vision.
And they end up alienating decent people across the globe.
Tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that regimented societies are strong and pure until those societies collapse in corruption and decay.
Like New Orleans.
Tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that free men and women are weak and decadent until the day that free men and women defeat them.
We don't know the course of our own struggle, the course our own struggle will take, or the sacrifices that might lie ahead.
We do know, however, that the defense of freedom is worth our sacrifice.
We do know the love of freedom is the mightiest force of history.
And we do know the cause of freedom will once again prevail.
Rado, rado, rado.
This is fabulous stuff.
This is clearly his issue.
This is the one issue that all of us on the Republican side have remained steadfastly unified behind this president on.
And it's the one issue we will.
And it's important, folks.
It is important.
You know, we've got some fissures out there over spending.
We have some fissures over the Myers nomination.
But it is important and it is crucial that when we support the president, we do so unabashedly and that we not shy from it because other issues may have disappointed us because this is a crucial one, a very important one as he's laid out.
And it just takes it right to the left.
This is exactly, the left for the last six months has been mounting its effort to get us out of Iraq, get us out of the war on terror.
The anti-war movement is demanding an anti-war candidate from the Democratic Party, and the president just took it right to him.
And this is exactly the kind of thing I like, and this is what I mean.
Just take it right to him.
And where today, might I ask, is Mother Sheehan?
She went back home, folks.
She went back home.
Her days as Bill Burkett and the Jersey girls and Richard Clark are over because the Democrats have morphed on to Harriet Myers and the Supreme Court and whatever else.
She's back home in a ditch in Los Angeles or California or wherever it is that she calls home.
And this is the kind of thing.
You can say whatever you want, you libs, but the policy is the policy.
We're going to do it.
This fires me up, folks.
This is good stuff.
Now, one more bite before we go to the break.
This is from Hardball last night, unrelated to the president.
It's about the Myers nomination.
Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was on with Chris Matthews.
And I honestly don't think Dean knows what he's saying here.
If he does, it's even more perplexing.
Chris Matthews says, Do you believe the president can claim executive privilege?
Meaning, will the Democrats be able to get the documents that she has written in support of positions as the president's lawyer?
And of course, the answer is no.
It's attorney client privilege.
But Matthew says, Do you believe the president can claim executive privilege?
Now, listen to this answer.
Well, certainly the president can claim executive privilege, but in this case, I think with a lifetime appointment of the Supreme Court, you can't play hide the salami or whatever it's called.
Now, normally I translate these things for people in Rio Linda.
This is one time I think they may know what he's talking about, where few other people do.
Folks, this is, I don't know, some of you may not either.
I'm trying to hide the salami.
You've got to know where to hide the salami.
You can't play hide the salami.
How can I explain this?
Well, no, I'm.
Yeah, you could say Clinton played hide the cigar.
That'd be a good way of explaining it, hide the salami.
You could also say, you know, you could make a sandwich out of sausage and a pita pocket, I guess.
I don't know, whatever works for you.
So I just got a note from my mistress in St. Louis says, How many mistresses do you have?
Folks, one more thing about this speech before I go grab some of your phone calls.
This speech is exactly what I'm talking about.
Did you hear any weakness in this speech?
You heard boldness.
Our enemies were not empowered.
Our enemies were not made to feel we are weakening.
Our enemies were, they had it told to them.
Our enemies know four square.
This is all I mean in every other area because when you do this, you equal leadership.
What the president was doing today was leading.
And he was leading and he was making no bones about it.
And there was no weakness displayed.
And there was no opportunity for any weakness to be perceived by our enemies either.
And that is a great way, I think, for me to illustrate what I mean by I'm afraid of the Myers choice because it allows our enemies, in this case, the Democrats, to perceive weakness.
Oh, he's avoiding us.
We've talked him out of what he was going to do.
He's afraid of our filibuster or whatever.
Or he's afraid the Republicans won't join.
Whatever it is, it emboldens them.
It empowers them.
And that's sort of like fingernails on a chalkboard to me.
Here's Tan Chi in Rapid City, South Dakota.
Welcome to the program.
Hi, Rush.
Hi.
I just wanted to complain a little bit that I don't think Harriet Myers is being treated, well, judiciously by our side of the aisle.
And I think that it's going to alienate a lot of women who might be leaning a little towards the conservative side to see conservatives fillet in Julianne her before she's even had a chance to speak up.
Even if I'd never even heard her speak on the subject of courts and judges and the role of the judiciary, I would still want her to be treated differently than she's being treated now.
You know, I hear this argument a lot, and well, I'm very sensitive to it, but there's a premise here that I have a big problem with.
And the premise is that people's intellectual qualifications or people's ideological components or whatever stem from their genetic code.
The genetic code that makes them black or white or Hispanic or Asian or male or female or gay or bisexual or trisexual, quadrusexual or heterosexual.
And I just, I reject that.
In these circumstances, we're all human beings.
And where it leads to is exactly what you said.
Women getting mad because a woman is being disrespected here.
And that leads to, well, only women can really understand women and only women can represent women.
I really don't believe that, but I do think there are enough women who do believe that that if we're ever going to change their minds, you know, you have to not alienate them from looking at the conservative side of the argument in the first place.
Okay, but I just, look, while it may appear that opposition to Harriet Myers is because she's a woman, I guarantee you none of it has anything to do with that.
There's nobody, I haven't heard a person say that their opposition to her is based on gender.
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