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Oct. 31, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:40
October 31, 2005, Monday, Hour #3
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Time Text
Look at this.
Everybody going gaga over this UN resolution calling Syria to account.
Yippee!
Isn't this a been here done net?
Oh, yeah.
The UN Security Council passed a resolution condemning Syria.
Yeah, well, they have 13 of those condemning Iraq.
And where did that get us?
Zero Zilch Nada.
Greetings, my friends, and welcome back.
The award-winning Rush Limbaugh program, a program that meets and surpasses all audience expectations on a daily basis.
The telephone number is 800-282-2882.
Looking forward to talking to you the remaining hour.
Pardon the sniffles here of the program.
The program is being ditto cam today, the whole program and this final hour is as well.
I want to go back here.
Oh, the phone number 800-282-2882.
I want to go back to this school lunch funding cut because I want to explain this.
Here's this AP story.
It's from Friday.
And I know a lot of people are going to hear, oh, no, this did them in.
This is the budget battle in 95.
And Democrats screamed them, why are they doing this again, those idiots?
They're not doing it.
I am convinced they're not doing it just like they weren't doing it then.
There were no school children that were going to go hungry back in 1995.
And I can't forget that whole period, by the way, because they had little kids.
By the end, I think in Louisiana.
Remember that?
Little kids in Louisiana were organized to write letters to Newt Gingrich saying, please don't starve us.
We can't learn if we're hungry.
Yada, yada, yada.
And I'm saying to myself, okay, let's just say it happened just for the sake of discussion.
Let's say that you're a parent and you find out the school lunch program has been just eliminated.
Are you going to let your kid go to school hungry?
Would you not pack a lunch like our mothers did back in the day?
It's apparently absurd, but there were no kids going without school lunches back then.
Now, here's this story, House Panel OK school lunch funding cut.
The House Agriculture Committee approved budget cuts Friday that would take food stamps away from an estimated 300,000 people and cut off school lunches and breakfasts for 40,000 children.
All right.
Now, that's all we need to analyze here, to use to analyze, because we've been touching on this food stamp story.
300,000 people, they say, will go without food stamps.
And we know that's not going to happen.
What's happening now is that the food stamp program is so bloated that they don't have enough applicants to spend all of the money currently in the food stamp program.
And so, as you well know, the food stamp, the agriculture department's out there advertising on some of my radio stations, by the way, some of the stations that carry this program, they're running advertising, soliciting applicants.
Some of the people never applied, but they got the food stamps anyway.
Some were not eligible.
They got the food stamps anyway, and they stopped taking them.
And so now they don't have enough applicants.
So what I'm sure the AP has done here is a simpler, okay, we're going to reduce the budget here because we got more food stamps than people need them.
And we've got to pare the budget down.
Everybody knows this.
Everybody's wailing and moaning about it.
So what AP has done here is they've taken the cut.
Whatever the cut, it's not a cut.
It's a reduction in the rate of growth.
But they're taking the number that's being talked about as the cut.
That static number.
And then they are dividing that number by the number of people who would fit into that number if it were the total budget.
And so what they've come up with is that the amount of money being cut would service 300,000 people with food stamps.
So they're just saying 300,000 people aren't going to get their food stamps anymore, but these are 300,000 people that don't exist because they're not getting their food stamps in the first place.
Now, I'm sure the same thing is going on with the school lunch program.
Aside from this obesity complaint that everybody's waging out there, there's no question that we have schools and a number of other institutions that are cheating on eligibility.
All of these programs are loaded with fraud and waste.
And a lot of senators and congressmen view the agriculture budget the same way as they view the highway bill, pork opportunities.
Not all of it, of course, but that's what stops some of them from taking efficiency seriously.
So what's actually going on here is that the government is gouging the taxpayers for bloated programs, and the administration just wants to stop the gouging.
If we are being taxed to pay for budgets that are larger than necessary, we have a bloated program.
We are being gouged.
All that's happening here is that the budgets are going to be more in line with the actual state of need.
So the AP comes up with imaginary figures of 300,000 people who would be cut off of food stamps when there aren't 300,000 people to be cut off because they're advertising for more applicants.
And they're doing the same shuck and jive, if you will, with the school lunch program, suggesting that 40,000 children are going to go without.
And they simply are using mathematics to come at this, but that's not going to happen.
There's nobody in their right mind that would actually come up with a program that reduces the number of beneficiaries by 40,000 needy people.
This isn't going to happen.
But yet, this story is worded this way, headlined this way, for the express purpose of getting people all bent out of shape and in a fit of rage.
And it's a giant, giant misunderstanding.
There is no incentive to give accurate numbers or to enforce eligibility requirements because if you do that, your budget will be cut.
If you run a budget, if you run a line item in the budget, administrators love to bloat the budget to get their budgets increased every year.
This is what baseline budgeting is.
There's no baseline budgeting never looks to the past to say, did we have enough or too much?
It just assumes that everything that was spent was needed.
And of course, inflation and things require growth next year.
And so the baseline builds in growth whether it's needed or not.
You don't do your own household budget that way.
No business does, but the government does.
And then when they spend less than they're planning on spending, but still spending more, the press and the Democrats call it a cut.
Because to them, government is God.
Government is the end-all and be-all.
And government must not ever, ever, ever do with less because that means that people will do with less.
All right, let's move on to the Libby indictment.
I've got some audio sound bites here and some comments to make about them.
Yeah.
Let's go to the soundbites first.
We'll do the comments after the break.
This to me is the key question and answer of the Fitzgerald press conference last Friday.
The ABC reporter Terry Moran said, many Americans are opposed to war.
Critics of this administration have looked at your investigation and hope they might see this indictment as a vindication of their argument that the administration took the country to war on false premises.
Does this indictment do that?
This indictment is not about the war.
This indictment is not about the propriety of the war.
And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.
The indictment will not seek to prove that the war was justified or unjustified.
This is stripped of that debate, and this is focused on a narrow transaction.
And I think anyone who's concerned about the war and has feelings for or against shouldn't look to this criminal process for any answers or resolution of that.
Now, let me tell you what that means.
That means that everything the press, led by Chris Matthews, my old buddy, has been trying to connect the dots on for the past three weeks, intently in the last five years, well, I guess three years generally, has just been nuked.
Whatever this indictment is about, it has nothing to do with the war.
So that means that every person in the media who said that that's exactly what this is about has just been blown to smithereens, has just been nuked.
They created an alternative reality.
That reality was that this indictment was going to lead to a trial on this administration's lying to the public to get us into war.
Where does that idea come from?
The idea comes from the fringe left that has been picked up by the mainstream media and the Democratic Party.
And it goes back to what I've been saying all along.
They are unhinged because they had their government taken away from them starting in 94.
They failed to get it back since.
They thought they were going to win it with Gore in 2000, but Bush won.
They think the election was stolen.
They think 2004, the election was rigged.
They do not look to themselves to find out why they might be losing.
They come up with conspiracy theories or crackpot ideas that blame the voters for being too stupid to see how brilliant Democrats and liberals are.
But they don't look at themselves.
And as a result of their being unhinged, they've concocted all these conspiracy theories, and they have created such an alternative universe, such an alternative reality, that the news today is not what really happened.
The news that you see on television every day, including today, is what the Democrats hope to happen and what the press hopes to happen.
And this business of trying to take out Sam Alito today is what they hope the news will be at the conclusion of the hearings.
And that's what they're trying to do, try to take him out.
And I welcome it.
Bring it on.
As I say, we want the debate.
But the media has begun.
There's really no difference between the Democratic Party and the media today.
Last time I was in Washington, I was driven by a couple of buildings.
My driver there always sees the need to give me a tour.
Hey, I know what this place is, Ralph.
You don't need to.
So he drove me.
He drove me by the NEA and he said branch office Democratic Party.
And then we drove by ABC and I said, there's the branch office of the Democratic Party.
And if we went way out of the way, we get to NBC and see a real branch office of the Democratic Party.
He didn't bother showing me CBS, but they're all branch offices of the Democratic Party.
And the point is that they have, they really, it's almost pathological.
I will get, Chris Matthews was making a bet on his TV show Wednesday, Thursday night last week that this indictment was going to be about the prosecution of the war and how Bush had lied to get us into it.
And that's been his theme for the last two weeks on that show of his.
Hard-boiled.
And it's gotten to the point he believes it.
Even now after the fact, he still thinks that's where this is going to lead.
They all do.
Fitzgerald just said, don't go there.
This indictment has nothing to do with that.
Zilch Zeronada.
So we have, so we got Joe Wilson to play for you of us at a break, but interesting, interesting editorial today in the New York Sun making the case advocating a presidential pardon for Lewis Libby.
Back here in just a second.
I want you to listen to Pat Fitzgerald again.
Same bite.
Last Friday at his press conference, Terry Moran From ABC basically said, does this indictment touch at all on the administration lying to take the country into war?
This indictment is not about the war.
This indictment is not about the propriety of the war.
And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it, should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.
The indictment will not seek to prove that the war was justified or unjustified.
This is stripped of that debate, and this is focused on a narrow transaction.
And I think anyone who's concerned about the war and has feelings for or against shouldn't look to this criminal process for any answers or resolution of that.
So on the Today's Show Today, the estimable and cleaner and purer than a wind-driven snow, Joseph Wilson, appeared with Katie Couric.
And she said to Mr. Wilson, Mr. Fitzgerald says this is not about the propriety of the war, but you disagree.
You think this is about the build-up to war and the Bush administration's rationale to invade Iraq.
Mr. Fitzgerald was investigating a possible crime.
He has made some determinations as to what crimes may have been committed.
My view of this is that the whole rationale for having attacked me as viciously as they did and compromising Valerie's identity was one to scare other people, keep them from stepping forward about other bits of disinformation this administration might have put in the debate to justify the war.
And two, an act of pure revenge.
Well, he couldn't find the evidence of it, Joe.
And this is so, frankly, odd.
I don't remember them viciously attacking this guy.
This guy really was under the radar until he went and wrote his op-ed in the New York Times and talked to Walter Pincus at the Washington Post.
And then it was quite obvious the administration, this guy's out there lying about what went on in Niger.
Who is this guy?
This is a policy dispute.
The administration is trying to sell the war with Iraq.
This guy's trying to undo it.
But what this vicious attack on him and compromising his wife's identity did not happen.
And not even, Fitzgerald didn't even allege that.
Now, this is another thing.
It troubled me because all during that press conference, Fitzgerald did refer to the outing of a CIA agent, but he never charged anybody with that crime.
He never made it a point that nobody was being charged with that crime.
Yet he goes on and on and on about how we're trying to recruit CIA people and their security is a must and we've got to keep them private and so forth.
But nobody was ever indicted on that.
I guess you could say that the independent counsel found out pretty soon there was no crime committed and he didn't close up shop.
Then he started looking at the, but this was a perjury case.
I mean, it started out as trying to find out if somebody illegally leaked her name, but nobody did.
They couldn't find any evidence of it, despite all these journalists.
And so basically what you've got here, you've got Scooter Libby indicted for lying to journalists.
And the journalists are going to have to be the witnesses at any trial.
And all this talk about outing his wife and his wife's identity being compromised and so forth.
If you're so worried about that, why pose for that picture for which you are paid, by the way, on the cover of Vanity Fair, even though she is wearing sunglasses?
If you're that scared about this, and if you're saying there are threats being made, why do that?
I think Mr. Wilson's a media whore, a publicity whore, as I said last week.
So Katie Courry says, Well, you refer to your 27 months of hell.
Why was it so hellacious?
How damaging do you believe this has been to you and your wife?
In Valerie's case, they also compromised the identity of the front company that she was working for.
If there were other agents working for that company, all their operations would have been compromised.
I think Mr. Fitzgerald said it quite accurately: this was a crime against the national security of the country.
Did you get death threats or have you gotten death threats?
We have received threats.
We've changed our telephone number.
Well, changed our phone number.
How many times have I changed my phone number in my life?
Whoopee-doo.
Fitzgerald said this is a crime against the national security.
Well, where's the crime?
Because he didn't charge it.
I'll tell you, I think the wrong person has been charged.
I think the wrong person was investigated.
I think if we're going to investigate policy differences, it just seems to me the wrong guy was looked at.
The whole wrong operation was looked at in total.
But we'll all see if it comes out in the trial.
Now, as I said, the New York Sun today has an editorial that advocates a presidential pardon for Lewis Libby.
Here's the relevant paragraph: If Ms. Plame didn't want her identity out, she shouldn't have gotten her husband a secret mission to Niger and then allowed him to wage a public campaign against the president's foreign policy.
And let's be straight about it.
She did engineer his trip.
She did play a role in that.
And then he went out and made his role public.
And then that, well, who is this guy?
Who is this guy?
Nobody in the White House sent this guy over there.
The CIA did.
And everybody says, who is this guy?
Well, naturally, when you start to find out who Joe Wilson is, you find out who he's married to and all that.
That's their point.
The leading prevaricator in this case is Mr. Wilson himself.
He has accused Mr. Bush of falsely leading America to war.
Mr. Bush had claimed the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa, quote unquote.
Mr. Wilson drank tea in Niger for a week and said that Bush's claim wasn't true.
But even after Mr. Wilson's objection, the July 2004 report by the British government's Butler Commission found that Mr. Bush's comment was well-founded.
In a July 2004 report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senators Roberts, Hatch, and Bond said of Mr. Wilson, the former ambassador, either by design or through ignorance, gave the American people and, for that matter, the world, a version of events that was inaccurate, unsubstantiated, and misleading.
Is there a serious journalist in the mainstream media who thinks that the story in the Libby case might be the CIA's efforts to defeat the president?
It's a question raised by the people at Powerline Blog.
And no, they're not interested in that power line because they have created an alternative reality.
They've been living it for years.
And to this day, despite what Fitzgerald said, they believe this indictment is about lying to the American people to take us into war because Joe Wilson is their God.
You're listening to Rush Limbaugh on the Excellence in Podcasting Network.
Okay, we're back.
And who's up next on the phones?
Annandale, New Jersey.
Hello, Tom.
You're next.
It's great to have you with us, sir.
Hello, Rush.
This is a great honor.
Thank you.
Talk to you, and I'd like to thank you for your continued service to our country.
You're welcome, sir.
This morning, I was listening to the radio, and they had a clip on of John Corzai convicting Scooter Libby of outing a CIA agent.
I thought he was called to uphold the laws of this country.
And I thought the law was that you're innocent until you're proven guilty.
Well, that's all true, but it doesn't really apply in this case to Democrats.
They've already got, you know, Libby's, to them, the indictment is the conviction.
The indictment is the jail sentence.
Libby is, that's just the way they're playing this.
But you have to understand, too, Corzine has his own ethical problems.
He's got a lot of ethical explaining to do in New Jersey.
And he's dead even now with Doug Forrester.
And he's got to do anything he can to change the subject.
And the national theme the Democrats have to take back the House and the White House in 06 and 08 is the culture of corruption on the Republican side.
And so he's got his own explaining to do.
He's just trying to keep people focused away from himself and on Libby.
He thinks it's a hot-button issue.
But he's got his own problems out there.
And I think this is just an attempt to distract people.
Alex in Hayward, California, welcome to the EIB Network.
Hello.
Well, the Italian prime minister, after their investigation, determined that the documents were falsified, and it was either falsified by some American interest or interest that wanted to proliferate going to war.
And what crime is Wilson guilty of?
Wilson didn't lie.
There was no lie in his report.
There were four other people who did the same investigation as Wilson and came up with the same conclusion.
Now, there was no lie on the part of Wilson whatsoever.
I'll tell you what I'm going to do.
I'm going to go get the House, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report, and I'm going to chronicle the lies they chronicle for you.
I'm going to get his New York Times op-ed, and I'll report the lies.
In fact, make this your project, Mr. Snurdley, because it would be a good thing to do this.
Because the Senate Intelligence Committee has documented a number of lies that Wilson has made.
He lied in his op-ed about a number of things.
And the British still to this day stand by the report on Yellow Cake and Niger.
I know about all these forged documents and so forth.
You liberals are experienced in those.
But the fact of the matter is that if you look at he hung up, if you liberals want to continue to roll the dice and you want to put all your eggs in the baskets of Joe Wilson and people like Bill Burkett, go right ahead.
I'm thrilled.
I am happy.
Every time one of you calls here, it is so blatantly obvious how unthinking you are.
It's mind-boggling, but it's blatantly obvious.
Here's Tony in Dallas.
You're next on the EIB network.
Hello.
All right, Rush.
How are you?
Fine, sir.
I just have a question about Judge Myers again.
I'm wondering how much of her lacking the East Coast intelligentsia, you know, the Ivy League education, if that may have had something to do with her rejection by Bush or by the elitists on the East Coast.
In other words, she didn't belong to the club.
And how dare someone that doesn't belong to our club be even considered for a position on the Supreme Court?
I really don't think it had anything to do with it.
No.
No.
In fact, I'll tell you, since it's over and done with now, let me just speak for myself.
I'm assuming that this opinion is held all or in part by several others who are on my side of the aisle.
And I've been through a lot of this.
I'll make it very brief.
You've heard me on the program today.
This nomination, this particular nomination, as will the next one be, is a huge opportunity.
We have to have the debate about the direction of the court.
We have to have that debate publicly.
We need to flush the left out.
We need them to be who they are.
A court nomination that they fear will do that.
When they run for political office, they hide behind names like moderate and progressive.
Oh, look at this guy, Hackett.
Hackett, as a Democrat, tried to run for Congress in Ohio, and he ran basically as a Republican, a pro-war Republican.
He's a Democrat, and he's anti-war.
But when he was talking within the district, he tried to run as a Republican.
They cannot be who they are.
They really can't, but this will flush them out.
Harriet Myers did not provide any opportunity to have the debate because she wasn't going to flush the left out.
were for her.
It's still very tough for me to talk about this.
I must be honest.
It's just wasn't up to it.
This has nothing to do with whether there's an Ivy League past, nothing to do with there's doctoral degrees, nothing to do with all of this so-called elitist stuff.
I mean, I have plenty of conservatives and friends who are not, they don't fit that mold.
A lot of them think they do.
I mean, the conservative movement's filled with a lot of pseudo-intellectuals.
Don't be misled about that.
And they really grate on me, I must be honest.
Nothing worse than a pseudo anything or an arrogant something or other.
But Harriet Myers, I just don't think, had the experience.
I just don't think she had the background, the education, or even the interest in the Constitution, which is what's crucial here.
I mean, basically, she's just not qualified.
And I don't think she'd be qualified if we had eight conservatives on the court and wanted to throw a seat away.
I still don't think she'd be qualified.
If we had eight not conservatives, eight originalists, I don't think she would ever be qualified.
That's just me.
That's my point.
I think the reaction would have been the same whether this was an important pick or not.
But the fact that it was an important pick just added even more fuel to the fire.
And it's nothing against her.
I think she would just put up for something she's not, this is not her bailey week.
Not everybody's qualified to do everything.
And just because you're an average American doesn't make you qualified to be anywhere in government.
This is not, you know, this is, if you can make this comparison, this is like taking a 17-year-old high school prodigy and saying, you know, Sunday you're quarterbacking the Super Bowl.
Get some experience as a judge somewhere and build a record and so forth, or as somebody that actively tries cases and has some sort of a record out there because this is a specific business.
You know, learning the Constitution is too crucial.
It's too important.
It's not just an average piece of legislation that anybody can be led to understand at some point.
Christine, in Bowling Green, Missouri, or is that Kentucky?
Missouri.
Missouri.
Well, I'm from Missouri, and I never heard of Bowling Green, Missouri.
Where is it?
60 miles north of St. Louis.
50 miles north of St. Louis.
I didn't think there really was anything north of St. Louis except Hannibal.
Okay.
Well, I'm glad you called and welcome to the program.
Thank you.
The reason I was calling was about the school lunch program that you were talking about.
Yes.
In a couple of neighboring towns around in our area, in this area that you didn't know existed.
We had schools that offered free lunch and breakfast and a school that offered free lunch to the children.
There was no summer school happening at this time either or any school of all, but they offered it to the children of the whole entire town.
So there were no income guidelines or restrictions?
I know.
I know.
This program's been used like this all over the country.
Well, it's extremely annoying to people like me.
You know, I'm a stay-at-home mom.
We have to watch our pennies.
And yet we're offering free food to all.
It's not.
It's not.
Let me tell you when this started.
In fact, I remember I was in junior high, and I was.
I forget.
I remember grade school.
My mother had to give me 50 cents a week for lunch or maybe it was 25 cents a day.
It was a bucket a quarter I had to take every week to give to the cafeteria, and that was lunch, 25 cents a day or something.
That was it.
I got to junior high, and there was the lunch program, and we all went there.
But that we bought it ourselves.
We went there was a cafeteria line.
We bought it ourselves.
Either that or we went out.
We went to a hamburger joint and they only gave us 22 minutes and we did it.
We ran to the cars.
We got a hamburger joint was ready for us.
Place called Wimpy's.
We went in there and got the stuff and we got back in school in time.
We paid for it.
It was junior high though.
I remember the principal coming on the loudspeaker during the announcements one morning during Homeroom.
And what was his name?
Fred Withrow.
Fred Withrow announced that starting next week or so, whatever it was, that we were going to start serving breakfast for those who didn't have a chance to eat a good breakfast at home.
And it was going to be milk and donuts and paste stuff like that.
But the cafeteria was going to open for breakfast.
Now, it was left up to us, the honor system.
It was clear by virtue of his announcement that was only if you didn't have the opportunity to eat breakfast at home because your parents couldn't afford it, school was opening up for you.
And back then, the only people that went in there for breakfast were those that couldn't afford it.
It was not really abused.
And it wasn't that many people.
But I can, you know, back in my day when they announced this, we did not sit together.
Wow, free breakfast, man.
I'll beat you to the cafeteria and I'll meet you at the cafeteria tomorrow morning at 7.15.
It's the last place we wanted to go.
We wanted to hang around outside smoking our cigarettes the last minute before we had to get in there.
Well, I don't have a problem with the free breakfast and the free lunch for those that are seriously needing it for a short amount of time.
And I don't mind the schools offering breakfast and lunch.
I pay for that for my children.
And that's quite a chunk.
But this offering it during the summer when there's not even any school happening is not okay.
I'm just giving you the starting point.
Once you start feeding the quote-unquote needy or those who can't afford it, how in the hell do you stop in June?
I mean, the needy are still hungry in June.
It's all you have to keep school open for them to go eat.
All this stuff has a start.
Everything that's proposed as a solution actually starts a new problem or starts the growth of it.
And that's exactly where it led to.
This little program of mine back in, what would this have been, 1960?
Yep, 67 to 68.
66.
Yeah, 66.
That's when this started.
And look at what's become.
Now the schools are open in the summertime for breakfast and sometimes lunch for people who can't afford it.
And you know the people trooping in there are now plenty of people who can afford it.
They're just, I mean, ask a beat cop in any city when they open a homeless shelter.
It's amazing how many homeless people move to the neighborhood where the new shelter is.
It's amazing how many how many takers there are for the freebies that show up.
Human nature, common sense.
But I know it's absurd.
What's also absurd is that out of our whole federal budget, 2.6 trillion, we're not spending enough money on all this.
It's just patently absurd.
At any rate, look, Christine, I'm glad you called.
was only kidding when I said I didn't know there was anything north of Missouri, St. Louis, but I mean, I had not heard of Bowling Green, Missouri.
I've heard of Bowling Green, Kentucky, and some other places.
But I'm glad that you got through.
Appreciate it.
We'll be back here in just a second.
Don't go away.
All right.
There are so many places to go to get these Wilson lies.
Stephen Hayes the Weekly Standard last week, Stephen Hayes, the Weekly Standard, put together just a brilliant and thorough piece on Joe Wilson's lies.
William Sapphire at the New York Times has written a couple columns that thoroughly document Joe Wilson's lies.
I mean, they're just frankly all over the place.
Here's one from the Weekly Standard.
I'm not sure if this is one of Stephen Hayes' pieces or not, but it is called The Nine Lives of Joe Wilson's Reputation.
And I'm not even sure of the date.
What was the date of this, Mr. Snerdley?
What date did you?
Doesn't matter.
Let me just go through this.
Take New York Senator Charles Schumer, for instance, who held a joint press conference with Wilson in the Capitol last Thursday.
This man has served his country, Schumer said.
What's happened to him since, said Schumer, groping for a novel literary illusion, is downright Kafka-esque.
Whereupon a reporter pointed out that Wilson's credibility is seriously in doubt.
Wilson said, I would urge you to go back and read the record.
Good idea.
What the record shows is that almost every public pronouncement of Joe Wilson's from the spring of 2003 forward is either an exaggeration or a falsehood or both.
The essence of his tale was that he had selflessly gone to Niger, personally debunked reports that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium there to reconstitute its nuclear program.
But his account didn't bear up under close scrutiny.
One, Wilson denied that his February 2002 mission to Niger to investigate reports of an Iraqi uranium deal was suggested by his wife, who worked in the CIA's counter-proliferation division.
In fact, according to the bipartisan findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wilson's wife, quote, offered up his name, unquote, at a staff meeting, then wrote a memo to her division's deputy chief saying her husband was the best man for the job.
This, by the way, is why people think that they both hatched this plot along with the CIA to undercut the whole Bush administration.
This is from July 25th Weekly Standard, by the way, we're reading to you here.
They think that this pair hatched this whole plot to undermine, because they're a bunch of libs.
Folks, they're just trying to undermine the war in Iraq and the Bush presidency.
Number two, Wilson insisted both that he had debunked reports of Iraq's interest in Niger uranium and that Vice President Cheney had to have been informed of this.
The intelligence committee found otherwise when it questioned Wilson under oath on at least, and I'm reading from the report now, on at least two occasions, Wilson admitted that he had no direct knowledge to support some of his claims.
For example, when asked how he knew that the intelligence community had rejected the possibility of a Niger-Iraq uranium deal, as he wrote in his book, Wilson told committee staff that his assertion may have involved a little literary flare.
Meaning he made it up.
In the spring of 2003, after a purported memo of agreement between Iraq and Niger was shown to be a forgery, Wilson began to tell reporters on background that he'd known the documents were forgeries all along.
But the Senate Intelligence Committee found that the CIA and Wilson had been unaware of the documents until eight months after his trip.
Moreover, it found that no one believed Wilson's trip added a great deal of new information to the story.
It found that for most analysts, the former ambassador's report lent more credibility, not less, to the reported Niger-Iraq uranium deal.
This is from the committee report again.
The Intel Committee's findings, because the CIA analysts did not believe that Wilson's report added any new information to clarify the issue.
CIA's briefer did not brief the vice president on the report, despite the vice president's previous questions about the issue.
As Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts concluded in the additional views section of his report, the former ambassador, either by design or through ignorance, gave the American people, and for that matter, the world, a version of events that was inaccurate, unsubstantiated, and misleading.
Now, this is a matter of record.
The fact the press wants to ignore it is an indication of what they hoped the story was to become.
He lied to the media while doing it, but he lied to the media in a way.
What they wanted to hear was lie.
What he told was the truth the media wanted to believe.
So, folks, this guy is just not worth the breath you expend on him.
We'll be back here in a minute.
All right, we got the week off to a great start here, folks, and we're going to keep on it.
We're going to stay after it.
We're going to keep the pressure on it.
We're going to kick butt tomorrow as well, and as many days as necessary to kick butt.
Look forward to seeing you back then, and just be cool.
Everything will be fine, and enjoyed it.
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