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Nov. 8, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:30
November 8, 2005, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
All I can say is it's about time.
Greetings, my friends, and welcome.
We are happy to be with you, as always, from the EIB Southern Command.
I am America's anchorman, Rush Limbaugh, firmly ensconced behind this, a golden EIB microphone.
The prestigious Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies are rollicking three hours of broadcast excellence.
Straight ahead, phone number if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882.
Email address, rush at EIBnet.com.
If my dad were only alive to see it, he would not, he would not believe it.
I, your humble host, a simple little radio guy, was the subject of a full one hour of floor debate on the United States Senate yesterday.
And this program, me and this program, were the subject of a one-hour floor debate on the floor of the United States Senate.
We have audio of highlights of that coming up in mere moments.
But first, ladies and gentlemen, early this afternoon, the Speaker of the House, Denny Hastert, and the Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist will announce a bicameral investigation into the leak of classified information to the Washington Post regarding the black sites where high-value al-Qaeda terrorists are being held and interrogated.
As I said the other day, I asked you a question, folks.
What of these two CIA stories actually poses the greater threat to national security?
The non-outing of a non-covert agent status or the outing, the leaking of true national security information about these so-called black sites, these so-called prisons around the world housing desperate and dangerous terrorists.
I mean, how are we ever going to get anybody to cooperate with us if they fear that their people will be targeted by al-Qaeda?
Here's the letter.
I, as a powerful, influential member of the media.
By the way, this is the Washington Post story that started all this.
Last Wednesday, story by Dana Priest, which revealed very classified information.
And experts are now saying that that leak, that story, has already done significant damage to U.S. efforts in the war on terror.
I have to tell you something.
This is something that is highly suspicious to me.
I think we've discussed this.
A number of others who have worked at the CIA, who have worked with the CIA, have also mentioned this.
There seems to be a distinct possibility that there's something up at the CIA and has been ever since Bush was inaugurated that is trying to undermine him, his presidency, and the war on terror.
And a lot of people are coming around to the belief that that may be the root of the Joe Wilson-Valerie Playmost story.
But this piece that ended up in the Washington Post last week is far, far, far more serious than anything involving Wilson and Plain.
The only reason that story is of any interest to anybody is that it's the forerunner to let's impeach Bush as far as the left and the media is concerned.
But Frist and Hastert sent a letter to the respective chairman of the House and Senate intelligence committees today to be Pete Hookstra in the House and Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence in the Senate.
Here's the letter.
Dear Chairman Hookstra and Chairman Roberts, we request that you immediately initiate a joint investigation into the possible release of classified information to the media, alleging that the United States government may be detaining and interrogating terrorists at undisclosed locations abroad.
As you know, if accurate, such an egregious disclosure could have long-term and far-reaching damaging and dangerous consequences.
It'll imperil our efforts to protect the American people and our homeland from terrorist attacks.
The purpose of your investigation will be to determine the following.
Was the information provided to the media classified and accurate?
Who leaked this information and under what authority?
And what is the actual and potential damage done to the national security of the United States and our partners in the global war on terror?
We will consider other changes to this mandate based on your recommendations.
Any information that you obtain on this matter that may implicate possible violations of law should be referred to the Department of Justice for appropriate action.
We expect that you will move expeditiously to complete this inquiry and that you will provide us with periodic updates.
We are hopeful that you will be able to accomplish this task in a bipartisan manner, given general agreement that intelligence matters should not be politicized.
Either way, however, your inquiry shall proceed, meaning if the Democrats go along with it, fine.
If they don't, fine.
The inquiry shall proceed.
The leaking of classified information by employees of the U.S. government appears to have increased in recent years, establishing a dangerous trend that, if not addressed swiftly and firmly, likely will worsen.
The unauthorized release of classified information is serious and threatens our nation's security.
It also puts the lives of many Americans and the security of our nation at risk.
Thanks for your prompt attention to this matter, Bill Frist, Majority Leader, U.S. Senate, J. Denny Hastert, Speaker, U.S. House of Representatives.
Now, it's about time.
It's not just that this is Republicans fighting back, although that's certainly an element of this that's pleasing.
It is that this is a serious matter.
And when this story ran last Wednesday, we spoke on this program about the possibility that there is somebody somewhere, or group somewhere, in the CIA or somewhere close to the CIA that is actively attempting to undermine the whole war on terror, either to undermine it or to undermine the Bush presidency.
That's maybe a distinction without a difference, but nevertheless, there are some people who will draw that distinction.
Another piece has been written today on the CIA disinformation campaign.
This by Jed Babin, who writes in the American Spectator today, the CIA's disinformation campaign against President Bush, headlined in the Wilson-Plame affair, is more jiu-jitsu than karate.
Instead of applying your own force to defeat your opponent, you turn his energy and momentum against him and bring him down.
The CIA, as much or more than the State Department, didn't support President Bush's decision to invade Iraq.
And to discredit that decision, it appears the CIA first chose an unspeakably unqualified political activist for a sham intelligence mission, structured it so that the results would be utterly public.
And then when the activist resumed his publicity hound activity, this is all Joe Wilson, demanded and achieved a high-profile criminal investigation into White House activities that resulted so far in the indictment of the Vice President's Chief of Staff.
So it's yet another attempt by another member of the media to focus attention on just what the real story is in the Plame Wilson story.
And it isn't Scooter Libby, and it isn't the administration.
It's what's going on at the CIA in an effort possibly to undermine the war in Iraq and the Bush administration.
It also goes on to point, I had this story in the stack yesterday and didn't get to it.
Major General Paul Vallelli, U.S. Air Force retired, U.S. Army, I'm sorry, retired, is a Fox News senior military analyst.
General Vallelli confirmed to Jed Babbin and a number of others that nearly a year, one year before Robert Novak's July 2003 column revealed Valerie Plame was a CIA employee, that former Clinton Ambassador Joseph Wilson told Major General Vallelli and his wife that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.
This revelation was published last week on WABC Radio's John Bachelor show.
It was repeated Monday night.
It blew more holes into Joe Wilson's tattered credibility and raises important questions about the CIA's actions.
Now, Major General Vallelli is, of course, a man of integrity.
He's not a partisan, a political activist.
He is a senior military analyst for Fox.
But it looks to me like the Wilson mission to Niger was not only a sham, but the CIA's demand for an investigation of Novak's outing of Valerie Plame may itself have been a criminal act because Vallely had already been told by Wilson himself a year before all this that Wilson, and Wilson's reaction to this, by the way, is panicked.
He is trying to maintain the offense on this, but he is in a pure panic and meltdown mode over this.
Clarice Feldman at the American Thinker has revealed today that Joe Wilson was sent to Niger a previous time by the CIA while trying to set up contacts for a business that he ran, this in 1999.
Wilson had already, this has nothing to do with the ROC, the war on terrorism, but there had already been a connection between the CIA and Joe Wilson and sending him to Niger back in 1999.
Now, beyond that, anything is just speculation.
But the fact of that is that Wilson was sent on a previous mission.
So, as Frist and Hastert now demand a bicameral investigation of the leak to the Washington Post of these black sites, these prisons around the world, it is important that another investigation be called for and go forward.
And that would be of the CIA and its involvement with the Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame story.
The Senate Intelligence Committee could immediately investigate and ask the following questions publicly.
What precisely does the CIA criminal referral that started the Fitzgerald investigation say needs to be declassified and published?
We have a right to know who approved the criminal referral and why.
The CIA is the one that really got this started by asking the Justice Department for a criminal referral.
Let's see it.
Who approved it and why?
Who was the person who approved the Wilson mission?
Who else approved the mission and how was it to be performed?
Why did they choose Wilson instead of somebody qualified to make this trip to Niger?
Why wasn't Wilson required to sign a confidentiality agreement, which meant he could come back and talk about this?
This is never done in the CIA.
Were his various op-eds vetted at the CIA?
Normally, when you come back, you've been on a mission, you have to publish something, you want to publish something, the CIA vets it.
Did they vet these things that he wrote, which were chocked full of lies?
And who else, besides Vallely and his wife, knew that Plame was a CIA employee?
When did they know it and from whom?
And finally, and this has been my big question all along, who was Novak's source?
Who leaked this to Novak?
Was it Wilson?
Was it somebody at the CIA?
Apparently, the Independent Counsel knows because Novak testified and Novak's not been charged with anything.
So this is apparently known, but we don't know it.
We keep going back to this Newsmax story that quotes the transcript from a 2003 CNBC show, It's No Longer on the Air.
And Alan Murray, Alan Murray is the host, in which Andrea Mitchell, according to the transcript, says, all of us that cover the Intel community knew that Valerie Plame was Joe Wilson's wife and worked at the CIA long before the Novak piece came out.
So there's lots to investigate here.
We had been told the Bush White House was going to be fighting back against some of these assaults.
And perhaps this is the first step, the bicameral joint House-Senate investigation into the CIA leak of information to the Washington Post that was published last Wednesday.
Quick time out.
We'll be back and continue faster than you know it.
You're listening to Rush Limbaugh on the Excellence in Podcasting Network.
And another startling bit of information, and I have this story buried somewhere in the stack, but some 27-year veteran of the CIA let it slip what the CIA's budget is.
$44 billion.
Yeah, that's never been known.
The CIA's budget has never been known.
It's one of these things that's always been kept secret.
Some woman that's been there 27 years, according to the story, inadvertently let it slip in a speech or a comment or somewhere that it was overheard.
And colleagues can't believe that she released this information, that she made this kind of a slip up.
You know, all hell's breaking loose over there at the CIA.
And you can look at this in a number of ways.
One of the ways is that they're feeling their oats and they think they've got Bush on the ropes.
Another way of looking at it is that they are on the ropes, that they're feeling desperate.
Bush is trying to clean the place out.
He's doing the same thing at the State Department.
He's got three years left.
And the New York Times has just the most hilarious editorial.
Here's a New York Times, which can't keep its circulation up.
The New York Times losing ad revenue.
The New York Times with all kinds of reporter problems and accuracy problems has his mean spirit editorial today saying, you know what?
We just realized there are three years left of this incompetent Bush administration.
We've never seen the U.S. government in more teetering, tottering hands than this.
What are we going to do about this?
They even go so far as to praise Reagan's second term in trying to portray Bush and his second term as a major threat to the future of the country.
He still has three years.
It's a forerunner.
Do we need to impeach Bush?
But, I mean, if you look at the Times, the Times is a little desperate too.
They're losing ad revenue.
Their company is down dollars and their circulation is not hot.
And many people are beginning to question the sanity of their reporters, like Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich.
I'm sorry, columnists.
So, I mean, it's funny to listen to these people that are in the, I think, in the quicksand.
And it's funny, while they think they're in the quicksand, or they think they're on the beach, these people are so happy they think they're on the beach.
What they are is in quicksand.
I think the CIA may look at it that way, too.
And I'm not trying to say this isn't dangerous, but, you know, a lot of people will make the conclusion, will come to conclusion that they're just doing this to drive the final nail in the coffin of Bush, feeling their oats.
They're going to get rid of this guy.
But there's a lot of things, you know, that we don't know.
We don't know half of what we think we know.
The great statistic I've always heard is don't believe anything you hear because none of it's true and believe half of what you see.
Snerdley can't keep his straight face.
The Senate debate on me and this radio program has now stretched into a second day and it is ongoing.
And Tom Harkin's got all sorts of charts and graphs behind him to make his case.
It's all about this program and Armed Forces Radio and how it's just not fair that there aren't a bunch of progressives on there because I dominate Armed Forces Radio, which is BS.
My programming, what, 1% of Armed Forces network programming?
1 to 2% is this program.
They carry one hour a day.
Harkin's acting like all armed forces radio network is this my show.
That's all that Armed Forces Radio does, as Kerry Michael.
They're having debates here.
This is some sort of an amendment that they're trying to attach to a defense authorization bill.
And John Warner, who's the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, is debating with Harkin over the rules that will govern a debate this afternoon on the so-called Inhoff Amendment and the Harkin Amendment.
As I say, as I say, if my dad were only alive now going on two days, and this is not the first time that Harkin has debated this on the floor of the Senate.
This was a year or so ago that it came up again or the first time, but this is an ongoing effort.
Well, I know he's got these guys lined up as co-sponsors.
He was on the floor by himself yesterday waiting for his co-sponsor to show up.
He's got Ted Kennedy as a co-sponsor.
Who else is a co-sponsor?
Dorgan, Brian Helmuthead-Dorgan is a co-sponsor of this.
Lordy, Lordy, little old Rusty from Missouri, occupying two full days of Senate floor debate.
You know, and I'm the one in my family who didn't go to school.
Everybody was worried about not making it.
One other story.
This is in the Washington Post today.
Wider scope in pre-war probe sought.
Democrats on the intelligence panel want the right to question top policymakers now.
We're investigating everything.
We need a bunch of Elliot Nesses to roll in there like Pat Fitzgerald to iron all this stuff out.
Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee want the right to interview top policymakers and speech writers as part of the inquiry into whether the Bush administration exaggerated, misused, or lied about intelligence into the run-up to the Iraq war.
This, according to Senator John D. J. Rockefeller, Democrat West Virginia, he's the panel's vice chairman.
He raised the possibility of issuing subpoenas, outlined a more wide-ranging approach than the one described by Committee Chairman Pat Roberts.
Now, this will just be the fourth investigation because the first three didn't prove politically valuable.
So they're trying to get a fourth, and they're trying to keep their base occupied, thinking that the Democrats actually are effective and competent in the U.S. Senate.
Remember my theory, this is all about the Democrats trying to hide their ineffectiveness and their incompetence at stopping the Bush agenda on several domestic matters, including the restructuring of the U.S. Supreme Court.
So the Democrats' run-amook strategy continues unfettered.
Another lawyer murdered in Iraq.
This is a lawyer that was defending one of Saddam's co-defendants.
I'll tell you, there's some people in Iraq that don't want Saddam to even get a defense, but he ought to do what I suggested yesterday if he wants to get out of his troubles.
Riding into the danger zone, undaunted, unafraid on the EIB network.
Let's go to Madison, Wisconsin.
Rich, welcome.
Nice to have you with us, sir.
Hi, Rush.
Mega, third time calling liberal dittos.
Thank you, sir.
I have a question.
I know you're always saying that the liberals are no friend of the CIA.
They always want to cut their budgets and undermine them, which I don't necessarily agree with, but you say it often.
Why would they want to undermine the most conservative President since Ronald Reagan, what's the point?
I'm having trouble hearing everything you're saying, so I'm going to ask you to repeat this a little slower because I'm not sure.
Let me see how I summarize your point.
You've heard me say that the liberals are no friend of the CIA.
They've done their best to undermine it and undercut it over the years.
So why would the CIA turn around now and help liberals?
That's correct.
Okay.
I'm glad you asked me that question.
I always try to help, right?
Well, I'm sure you are.
And this is, you know, you qualify as a liberal.
This is what we've always said during our caller clinics in the past.
This is how you make the host look good.
You don't do it by calling up and complimenting and praising.
You ask questions like this that elucidate information.
The first thing in explaining this is that the premise of your question is partially correct.
That is, liberals have had no love for the CIA at all.
And the thing you have to recognize is that over the period of time that they've had the ability to weaken the CIA, they've also gotten members of their own elements in the CIA.
That's one of the problems with this.
The people in the CIA that are engaged in trying to undermine this administration, the war on terror, made up of a whole bunch of different people across the spectrum.
Some of them are liberals and they're doing it simply because of ideology.
Some of them are embarrassed that they failed to stop 9-11, that they didn't get anything right about the Iraq pre-war intelligence, and they're trying to cast blame elsewhere.
The other aspect of it is that there's this old saying: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
If George Bush is your enemy and you are liberal Democrats who hate the CIA, but the CIA is doing its best to undermine Bush, then even though you've always hated the CIA, at this moment, you will join forces and share a goblet of wine with your enemy because you are united against your new friend because you're united against the common enemy, which in this case is George W. Bush.
But the premise, if the libs hate the CIA, that's not, there's no if.
The liberals have always hated the CIA.
Go back to the church committee.
The left in this country has always targeted the CIA as being rogue and imperial, out of control, and promoting discord around the world.
And another silent arm, invisible arm of evil, U.S. superpower status and imperialism.
So over the years, the Libs succeeded in passing a bunch of laws that effectively weakened the CIA.
And you've had Democratic presidents in that time and Democratic presidents who are liberal, who have the same view, put people at the CIA who reflect their own worldview.
That results in the whole agency being torn apart and weakened.
But when Bush comes along and gets elected, he makes it clear what his objective is.
He's going to straighten that place out and the State Department.
And it's no question, no mystery to me, why during the run-up to the Iraq War, all of these leaks, the CIA and the State Department leaking to the Washington Post, the New York Times, how many stories did we see?
Generals of the Pentagon, what we're going to do in Iraq will never work.
How many leaks resulting in stories that gave us the battle plans?
This is what we're planning to do.
And we had how many people working at the CIA retire who started appearing on television talking about how we can't accomplish this in Iraq.
There's no way.
The Bush administration screwed this up left and right.
Then they allowed a couple of these agents to start writing books.
None of this stuff had ever happened before.
None of it.
So there has been a cultural change at the CIA over the years with the libs, just like they have done in a lot of our bureaucracy, spreading their tentacles deep in there.
And Bush is enemy number one because he's trying to clean it up.
He's trying to clean it out.
Porter Goss, former member of the House from Florida, is the new CIA chief.
He's new to director of Central Intelligence.
And when he was appointed and went over there, that's when a lot of these internal fights spilled over into the public, and we began to see what was going on.
There are clear divisions between Goss and senior management at the CIA.
I mean, he can't go in and just unilaterally the first day get rid of everybody.
He's got to go and size up the situation.
There have been leaks about how he's lost control, that Gauss is the wrong man for the job.
The CIA has been allowed to work as a black op itself for how many years?
I mean, it's part of its basic structure.
And for these changes now to start taking place and for these public efforts that are being made by elements of the CIA, to me, indicates that there's success in straightening the place out.
It's like this guy at the State Department, Wilkerson, Larry Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell's chief of staff for 16 years, all of a sudden out there doing speeches and writing articles about how screwed up this administration is, don't know what they're doing, don't know which way's up, which way is down, screwing up this war, that war, all for the good old days.
He's all upset because a cabal of Cheney and Rumsfeld hijacked foreign policy.
Well, hell's bells.
It doesn't, if nothing else, that indicates the hubris and the arrogance of the State Department, that the elected representatives of the people, president, vice president, Secretary of Defense, have nothing to say about foreign policy.
You cannot, as an elected president and vice president, hijack anything in government, particularly foreign policy.
You just can't do it.
So I think what's happening here is that there are a lot of people in the CIA who have screwed it up.
And we have evidence.
Pre-9-11 intel, the intel leading up to the Iraq war that they sent Colin Powell over to the United Nations with.
We don't know how much of that turned out to be bad, how much of it was purposely bad.
We just don't know.
But we do know that the CIA has evolved a reputation of incompetence.
The bottom line is people don't trust them.
The bottom line is they didn't know things that they should have known given what they're in business to do, and they are the intelligence agency of the world's lone superpower.
You mean to tell me that we can't put human intel on the ground, that we have to only rely on satellites?
Why is that?
The Church Commission, my friend, the Church Commission dictated who could be hired and who couldn't be hired.
Well, if you're going to infiltrate Al-Qaeda, guess what you're going to have to do?
You're going to have to go out and hire some human debris.
You're going to have to train them to be your agents, pay them.
And the only way we're going to get people inside these operations is to hire the kind of people that will pass muster by these groups.
Well, we can't do that because we can't hire unsavory characters.
We can't assassinate foreign leaders.
We can't basically do anything to protect ourselves.
So we rely on satellite and other electronic eavesdropping devices as our sole source of intelligence gathering, it appears.
So I think that there's a huge, huge problem that exists here.
And this is nothing that George Bush is going to go public with, by the way.
Remember, in fact, that he gave George Tenet, what?
What was that medal?
The Presidential Medal of Honor, Medal of Freedom, highest medal you can get.
People scratch and they're going, what?
He may be a good guy.
I don't know, but ran the CIA for Clinton and then under Bush and 9-11 happened.
And everybody wondered, why didn't heads roll?
Why wasn't anybody fired at the CIA?
Well, you know, there's a lot of fear involved.
You turn people out of that place.
What are they going to do when you turn them out?
Bush trying to maintain some unity and support in the government, trying to refocus everybody on who our true enemy is.
And they continue to still try to undermine him.
As to this business of why would the CIA help the left or why would the left help the CIA, who's the common enemy?
George W. Bush, the enemy of my enemy, is my friend.
Chris in White Plains, New York.
Hello, nice to have you on the EIB network.
Always an honor to speak to you, Rush.
Thank you, sir.
I remember a little over a year and a half ago opening up the New York Times and seeing a picture that showed the insignia tail numbers on a tail of an airplane giving the company's name of that airplane and the company and all the pilots and basically their home phone numbers of undercover CIA air operations that they ran to help transport suspected terrorists back and forth.
And I never heard any outrage from the Senate or from Teddy back then on this subject.
That's a good point.
This was a New York Times story within the past year.
Might have been last fall, fall a year ago.
And they basically uncovered a, what?
When was it?
They outed a CIA air charter operation.
The CIA has a lot of things that appear public.
They have public companies.
Valerie Plame.
Valerie Plame worked at some CIA front organization.
It was thought to be just an ordinary run-of-the-mill Washington little strip mall company.
CIA has these things constantly.
They've had air forces.
They've had their own, well, call it Air Force.
They've had a number of front businesses around which and behind which they hide.
And they had an air charter operation.
They had a bunch of Gulfstream fours and fives, and they were putting tariffs on these things and transporting them places.
New York Times runs the story.
Outing the operation, jeopardizing the operation and letting the enemies of America know, all right, you see anything from this particular company.
Well, they had to shut the company down, no doubt, and begin doing something else.
And you wonder, where was this stuff come from?
Who else but the CIA knows of these secret CIA operations?
So a lot of people are beginning to get very wary and very suspicious of all of these leaks about what's going on at the CIA.
And the CIA is so secretive.
I mean, they've leaked a lot over the course of their existence.
Some leaks have been to throw people off the scent.
But I'll tell you it's a different organization now than when it was headed up by Bill Casey back in the Reagan days.
I'll tell you, people don't know this, and this is one of the, I think, testaments to the CIA itself.
Bill Casey was Reagan's CIA director, and this was a hero.
Bill Casey, and he worked with, I forget the name of the, some of you will know this.
I'm having a mental block on the name.
Wild Bill Donovan.
Bill Casey, Wild Bill Donovan started the OSS, which became the CIA.
This was, and I have a friend who worked with them, one member of mine in one of my clubs, talked about this at great length once.
These guys started back in World War II, and they were doing intelligence gathering when there were no rules.
They could go anywhere, do anything, but they were patriots.
And they were doing what they could to save this country, defeat the Nazis, defeat the Japanese, and they pulled no punches.
And these were true patriots, folks.
We don't have people like this around today.
And Bill Casey was the last of them.
But they were a tremendous bunch.
I'm sure there are books written about them.
I know there are that you could get.
Wild Bill Donovan and Bill Casey.
I'm mentioning the liberals listening to this think I am nuts.
These are the classic examples of what's wrong with America.
Guys like Bill Casey and Wild Bill Donovan, who started the OSS and gave us the CIA, who they despise and institutionally they have despised ever since its existence.
Then you have great former agents like James Jesus Angleton, who would be spinning in his grave today to see what his agency had become.
You've had some pretty good CIA directors over the years and some pretty lax ones and bad ones, but it's not the agency that it once was, apparently by obvious observance, observation.
I mean, it's just far different than it used to be.
But all these leaks, nevertheless, all these leaks are raising all kinds of eyebrows.
This is just, it's almost, in my lifetime, unprecedented.
And I think it just goes to just how hated George Bush is.
You people don't really know how entrenched all these bureaucrats have been for 30, 40 years, 20 years, these career people.
So this Wilkerson guy at the State Department will give you a pretty good idea of how they're all feeling.
But Bush is coming in trying to send Condoleezza Rice over to the State Department was to put his own personal stamp on the State Department.
And they don't like that over there.
And they play for keeps.
They think that they are autonomous and they are their own government and they are their own population and their own people.
And you don't dare encroach.
You don't dare try to change what they're doing.
And they will leave you alone.
But when you don't leave them alone, they're going to fight back just like an enemy country.
And that's what's going on.
Quick time out.
We'll be back.
Gene in Pittsburgh, you're next on the EIB network.
Glad to have you with us.
Hello.
Yeah, hi.
Rush, just to amplify your point, going back and looking at who is running state, I ran into, when I was in the Army, I was in the Intel branch, and I ran into a lot of people whose worldview was liberal.
They, I can assure you that a lot of people look at President Bush's moral clarity as amateurish.
They think that he's getting the country into further trouble by looking at things black and white.
And they view themselves as being patriotic by trying to hamstring the administration's foreign policy.
They view themselves as the high priests of foreign policy and how dare some temporarily elected people get in there and mess up what they've been working at, you know, trying to perfect for the past 40 years.
That's exactly right.
But let's not forget one central element to all that that is the foundation for it.
And that is they resent U.S. superpower status and they consider our superpower status to represent the threat in the world that causes all these other skirmishes to erupt.
Well, exactly.
We're not.
They blame us.
It is our fault.
We're not afraid to call to say something as black as black as white as white.
They view that prima facie as being amateurish and they're proud of their own.
No, no, I agree with that, but what I mean is they simply are opposed to our power.
They're opposed to the power we have.
They consider the power we have to be dangerous.
And of course, if you add all the other things that you've said and you're exactly right, these people, moral clarity scares them.
Nuance is what they're experts in.
Gray areas.
Nothing is so simple as to be black and white.
Simpletons are black and white.
Simpletons believe in right and wrong.
There are always too many variables, and it's arrogant to say I'm right and they're wrong.
It's arrogant for Bush to call terrorists evil.
And these people fear that.
It's like they feared for their lives when Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as the evil empire.
Oh my God, he's going to start a nuclear.
Oh my God.
Honesty, they cannot deal with it, particularly when it's uttered about our enemies, because their job, State Department, CIA, basically is containment.
Containment, in addition to being a horrible policy, also allows them to continue to exist.
If you solve a problem, if you defeat an enemy, if you get rid of a diplomatic snafu one way or the other, you don't need a diplomat anymore to deal with the diplomatic snafu.
So, I mean, there's a lot underlying all this, but you hit the nail on the head with all of it.
Bush is a simpleton.
Moral clarity is simply, that's no different than being a Christian right-wing pro-life hick.
That kind of moral clarity is dangerous in a complicated, nuanced world, and only bright, smart people like us can deal and maneuver in it.
And Bush is going to destroy us all, blah, And they fear their own country's power.
Back in a moment.
Lots more to go on this.
You've heard about the Massey lies, have you not?
Well, if you haven't heard about the Massey lies, why hang on.
This is only going to get even more intriguing, friends.
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