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Dec. 5, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:20
December 5, 2005, Monday, Hour #2
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Supposed to snow big time in New York.
Supposed to snow the Philadelphia tonight between three and seven inches, three and seven inches in the Washington and Virginia areas.
Yeah, you can see that stuff moving in there.
And the Seattle Seahawks play the Iggles tonight on Monday night football, and they're going to retire Reggie White's number in a, I get probably a halftime ceremony.
Nothing better than watching football in the snow, particularly when it's 81 degrees where we happen to be.
Greetings, my friends, and welcome.
Great to have you here.
The EIB Network and El Rushball back at you.
Two more hours of broadcast excellence, and we are ditto camming the whole program today.
We're into our second hour.
I'll tell you what, I feel like I've been away for a week.
This was such a jam-packed weekend.
I got back late last night.
I was in New York Friday afternoon, Friday night, went to dinner at Patsy's with some friends.
I got up Saturday.
I flew into Kansas City because I went to Stroud's on Saturday night since they're moving their current location, closing it down on December 31st.
I hadn't been there in so many years.
It was just, it was fabulous.
George Brett sitting on my left, my friend Mike Hartley from Hawaii sitting on my right.
Our wives are all there.
And Brett, we're all just ordering obscene amounts of food except for me.
You know, I'm eating responsibly.
Like Brett and Hartley said, by my own bowl of green beans, don't bring this giant platter out.
I want my own bowl of green beans.
The waitress said, what about you?
I said, I want my own bowl of gravy.
That's just, it's food is just, it's just delicious.
And it tasted exactly the same as the last time I'd had it.
Well, we waited.
We waited for about a half hour, I think.
Yeah.
Nobody, hey, nobody.
That's right.
I'm a man of the people.
I went in there and we're standing.
They brought us some fried shrimp.
You know, these gigantic fried shrimp about which we had the big economic lesson here a long time ago.
People wonder why the biggest shrimp in the world are in Kansas City when there's no shrimp there before they're shipped in.
At any rate, yeah, there's one guy tapped me on the shoulder and said, very young guy, he said, I just want to tell you, his father, his mother, your biggest fan.
And I smiled back and said, oh, so you don't listen and started laughing.
He said, no, no, no, no, I do too.
I said, I'm just, everybody tells me their parents are big fans.
And he was a police officer in Kansas.
And he said, you want me to surrender here?
You know, the way prosecutors are going, I felt like surrendering at Stroud's just for the hell of it.
We were sitting eating dinner.
A woman came up and tapped me on the shoulder.
Would you sign this?
And I said, sure.
And I signed it.
She said, do you think your buddy George would sign it?
It's up to him.
So she tapped him on the shoulder and he signed it.
And she said, thanks so much.
Thanks so much.
I appreciate you doing this.
I just, I didn't know if I should.
I said, that's okay.
You were courageous.
More than Democrats are.
Way to go for it.
I don't blame you a bit.
It was a fabulous time.
Everybody in there was just this tremendous.
I flew out of there late Saturday night.
Had some golf yesterday and puts it all over.
And I really, it was a short night last night.
And it was so jam-packed that it was cold in both places.
Oh, wind chilling, Kansas City was 22 degrees.
When I went to the airport, get back on the airplane.
It was just, I'd forgotten.
It's bone-chilling cold.
And people live there year-round are used to it, and I was at one time.
Okay, Hillary Clinton, there were several loud calls to bring the troops home during a speech by Senator Clinton in Chicago on Saturday.
She was in town to inspire young people to get involved in the political process, and they must have heard her.
It was a news report here by WLS TV Channel 7 in Chicago.
She first had to speak over the shouts of some of those young adults.
This audio soundbite number 13, Mike.
We've got 13, 14, and 15 here.
Let's start with 13.
You know, I have to say that I appreciate the passion and the intensity that you feel about Iraq.
I share it, and you're here expressing your opinion.
But let's make sure that people have a chance to be part of a dialogue.
And I do not believe that they want to hear from you at this moment.
Whoa!
In Keisha, could you hear what the protesters were chanting in the background?
The protesters were chanting or shouting troops out now, troops out now.
She was only this is, I don't know if it's a sister soldier moment or not, because she, well, people don't want to hear from you now.
People here in this hall don't want to hear from you now.
This is not going to stand her in good stead.
Obviously, somebody in her camp still thinks triangulating this war is going to eventually stand her in good stead.
And for that to work, for that to work, she's going to have to have to try to go get votes of people not in the Democrat base.
Now, we're talking about after the nomination, well, even during the nomination, she's going to have some pure anti-war candidates that oppose her in the nomination.
But it's tough to find a center on the war to triangulate, which is what she's trying to do.
They're protesting Hillary.
They're protesting Hillary Rodham Clinton.
They're protesting anybody.
This is what the left does under these so-called, I don't know who these Democrats are that are in blind denial, utter denial of just what their base has become and just who their base is.
But they're out there shouting troops out now, troops out now.
Some of them tried to shout her down.
And you heard her.
She was in full screech there.
And the last time we heard her sounding like that's when she's railing against Bush talking about how she defines patriotism now.
You know, she sounds like everybody's first and second wives in these soundbites here, just yelling and screeching and all this sort of thing.
It's going absolutely berserk.
And it's not professional.
It's not something that sounds like the confidence and the presence of the world's smartest woman.
She was saying, give me a chance and I'll address that if you will be quiet.
So listen to this again.
Listen to Soundbite 13 again.
Then we'll play you a couple of sound bites for how the television and radio stations in Chicago reported this.
Here is Mrs. Clinton practically as soon as she hits the stage.
You know, I have to say that I appreciate the passion and the intensity that you feel about Iraq.
I share it and you're here expressing your opinion.
But let's make sure that people have a chance to be part of a dialogue.
And I do not believe that they want to hear from you at this moment.
I don't believe they want to hear.
What Hillary's saying is, I don't want to hear from you at this moment.
That's what she's saying.
She's telling me, shut up.
I don't care about you.
I don't want to hear about you.
I don't want to hear from you now.
That's what she was saying to him.
Now, let's go listen to the coverage of this.
She was heckled by protesters in Chicago.
Now, when Bush or Cheney get heckled, it's national news.
This was only reported locally on television in Chicago.
This is how WBBM-TV covered it.
The protesters interrupted Senator Hillary Clinton during her keynote speech at Roosevelt University.
The protesters shouted at Senator Clinton, demanding she join a call for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
But she told them that while she has deep feelings about the war, the audience was not there to hear them.
And last night, the senators stopped in at the Crowbar for a benefit for her 2006 re-election campaign in New York.
Our country needs you, and we need you to be involved and caring about all kinds of issues that are going to make a difference to the world that we're going to live in.
Crowd of well-wishers cheered on Senator Clinton.
I don't know, I guess he did some dancing there and didn't let her presence get in the way of a good time.
Yeah, so that's how TV covered it.
Not nearly like it would have been covered if it were Bush or Cheney.
Our country needs you.
We need you to be involved in caring about all kinds of issues that are going to be making a difference in the world that we are going to live in.
So she's out there.
She's fundraising for all this, make no question about it.
Fundraising for a New York re-election bid, fundraising for her presidential bid at the same time.
Quick time out.
Do you know that some oil executives are very, very worried that oil prices are going to fall fast and maybe too far?
That's right.
I got an international World Tribute right here.
Some oil executives worry that prices may fall.
Meanwhile, Helmut Head Dorgan's still out there talking about his windfall profits tax.
We'll have a lot more on all this coming up after this.
You heard Hillary Clinton shouting, we don't want to hear what you have to say now.
I understand why you are here.
It sounds like this.
I'm sorry to ruin this Christmas music, folks.
It just struck me that I'm really sorry about that, but that's what she sounded like.
Here it is, April 28, 2003, in Southington, Connecticut, speaking at the Democrats' annual Jefferson-Jackson Bailey dinner.
I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration, somehow you're not patriotic and we should stand up and say, we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.
Okay, okay.
So you see, this is when she gets agitated and she gets heated up and probably pretty frequently.
This is what people can expect her to sound like.
Well, you know, that's a good point.
Mr. Sturdley says, what if people are not allowed to disagree with her?
Because whoever allowed these anti-war people into her Chicago appearance are probably already fired.
It's not supposed to happen at a Clinton event.
No dissent.
Nobody opposing the Clintons ever gets into these things.
Nothing like this is supposed to happen.
This is a total breakdown in operational planning.
Total breakdown here in the setup.
People in the advanced team totally screwed this up.
Normally what happens like this, you get arrested.
Remember this couple in Chicago when Bill Clinton went in there?
I think their last name was Kelly.
I'm not sure yet.
But a woman shouted at Clinton as he walked by, you suck.
And Secret Service arrested her.
I mean, you're not, yeah, you can, as far as Hillary's concerned, you can disagree with the administration all day long, but you can't disagree with her.
That's not permitted.
Let's go to the phones.
People have been waiting patiently.
We go to Los Angeles.
Jim, you're first.
Welcome to the program, sir.
Thank you, Rush.
You know, I think you should have a new title.
You're the great mirror, because you reflect everything that these Democrats say and it point it right back at them, and then they have to deal with it.
And that's a great public service.
So thank you.
Thank you, sir.
You know, I disagree a little bit about Ramsey Clark being there because I really feel he legitimizes the rule of law above the Koran.
And that's something that is very important in that area of the world.
We need to show that the rule of law is more important than the Koran.
And Ramsey Clark will help provide that type of image for this trial and give credit to the prosecutors because the first case that they're going to try is a murder case where he slaughtered all those people.
And the defense of it's an unjust war isn't going to come into play in that case.
Now, even if it does, well, America was right to go in there.
And we have the ability to take that on and prove it.
So give credit to those lawyers.
You know, Teddy Roosevelt said.
Wait, Hold it.
Hold it.
Hold it just a second.
I want to make sure.
By give credit, you are suggesting that Ramsey Clark's lunacy, that Ramsey Clark's own dementia, will give credit to the notion that Saddam got a fair trial when this is all over?
Yeah.
Okay, so your concern is that you're worried about what people think.
No, I think it's a current.
If this is going to become a circus, I just want to, this is going to become a circus before it's all over with.
Here we have, and Matt, would you have suggested Ramsey Clark defending somebody like him at the Nuremberg Trials?
Absolutely.
Because the rule of law is the foundation of our country, and it is so important.
And if it's the foundation of that country, then the Koran is secondary.
And that way people can live and abide by laws.
Wait, one more question.
What's the Quran?
You keep mentioning the Koran.
Well, you may be more informed than I on this trial, but what's the Koran got to do with this?
Are they trying him according to the Koran?
Well, the Koran is how they rule themselves and their government.
It's not just a religion.
It's really a form of government.
So if we can separate church from state in that area of the world, then we can have a country we can deal with, and the rule of law and liberty will be far more important.
Here's the problem I have with that.
The Quran's the rule of law.
Saddam should have been executed by now.
If the Quran's the rule of law over there, the Quran, what they're operating on, Saddam already should have met the 72 virgins along with that guy in Pakistan that our CIA drone took out.
In fact, those 72 virgins should have been used up by now.
I think, and I understand your point, but I pulled Ramsey Clark's lunatic.
Ramsey Clark's not over there trying to defend Saddam.
Ramsey Clark is trying to embarrass the United States.
Ramsey Clark is seeing to it that Saddam's exonerated.
Ramsey Clark's purpose over there is to embarrass the Bush administration.
He's not doing what he's doing for the lofty goals of separation of church and state and the sense of justice in Iraq.
He's got one purpose.
And the fact that Democrats in this country are not denouncing him, that they're not distancing themselves from him, is proof positive of what his mission is all about.
Ramsey Clark is part of an anti-American organization, this Code Pink and these other groups international answer.
This is not about a fair trial.
This is gumming up the works.
This is about making sure there isn't a trial.
This is about make sure intimidating everybody over there involved in the prosecution gets cold feet and lets this thing go.
I disagree with you totally about this, particularly on this idea that having some wacko lawyer pull out all the stops and still Saddam being found guilty somehow gives credibility to the process.
This whole notion of doing for courting world opinion on this stuff, screw that.
You know, it's about time to start doing the right thing.
The Republicans in Congress could take this advice, too.
You know, we asked this eternal question.
Since when did they forget who elected them?
Since when did they go to that town and forget what they were elected to do?
Since they started being concerned what people in that town think of them.
That's what happened to him.
Dick Army has a great piece, the opinionjournal.com yesterday about this.
I'll get to it here in just a moment.
I'm just telling you, whether it's a nation, whether it's a neighborhood, whether it's an individual, you start doing everything you're doing because of what other people's opinion of you is.
You can be dead certain you're not going to end up doing the right thing over half or more of the time.
Scott in Burleson, Texas, you're next, sir.
I'm glad you waited.
Welcome to the program.
Thank you, sir.
Longtime listener.
With the whole Kerry statement, that's just completely ridiculous, sir.
There was a village that we regularly patrol, and there was a small, our young child, young boy, stung by a scorpion a number of times, a deadly scorpion, sir.
And we actually gave him the village doctor didn't know what to do with it.
And so we actually gave him aid and saved his life.
And I don't know if that's terrorism, but Scott, I want to stop you.
I want to stop you right here.
I don't want you to have to call this program humiliate yourself by having to defend yourself against charges by somebody that may have dementia.
We all know that you are not a terrorist, Scott.
We all know that you have not snuck into the homes of Iraqi citizens brutalizing women and children under the cover of darkness.
In fact, we know that many of you have been gunned down, passing out children to candy.
We know that many of you have been blown up, being faked out by kids sent out by terrorists.
You've been trying to do good things, and a lot of that has gotten some of you killed.
You don't need to call here and defend yourself, and I'm not going to let you do it.
I'm not going to let you descend to that level, having to defend some outrageous charge that you are nothing but a terrorist.
We all know you're not.
Well, I never, I realize, and I realize that I don't have to defend myself, and I don't have to defend my brethren in arms.
But it boggles my mind that how a man, scratch that, a yellow-bellied coward such as Kerry is so predominant in America, where in a country that prides itself on its courage and its heroism, that a man who has repeatedly turned his back on his troops, on his men, on his country, held up on these high standards.
Okay, now that's great.
You've just spelled it out real well.
Do you know what you've just described?
A modern-day liberal Democrat in the United States of America.
That's who they are.
That's exactly who and what they are.
And there's nothing patriotic about it.
And as you said, there's certainly nothing courageous about anything Senator Kerry happens to be saying, no matter where he goes.
Yes, sir.
Yes, sir.
But I just want to make sure the American public doesn't have any inkling, any shadow of a doubt, what our troops are doing.
And there's no way that they don't.
They don't.
There may be a few crackpot dolts on the far left who think of you this way, but you can put the whole number of them in a thimble.
And we are back serving humanity.
El Rushball would have my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.
Which one of you guys was it that sent me the Lincoln Chafee story earlier today, Brett?
That was Brett.
All right.
There is because I want what did you say?
Yeah.
It's just amazing.
And I'm going to juxtapose it with the piece from Dick Army from yesterday on the Wall Street Journal's opinionjournal.com.
Why are Republican leaders governing like Democrats? is his question.
And the Boston Globe piece on Link Chafee is how the Republicans are embracing it.
The Republicans are embracing Link Chaffee.
We need Link Chaffee to hold on to our majority.
And so you read this, you read these two things, and you just want to throw your hands up.
You just want to throw your hands up.
We'll get to all that in due course, as well as some oil executives worrying that prices may fall.
I can't wait to hear what some people are going to say is a reason for this.
Here's Don in Dubuque, Iowa.
You're next, sir, on the EIB network.
Hello.
Rush, hi.
I can't tell you how much of an honor it is to talk to you.
I don't care what else I get accomplished today.
It won't make up for it won't come close to being able to talk to you.
God bless you for what you do.
Thank you very much, sir.
I appreciate that.
I've been listening to you for 15, 20 years, however long you've been on.
But the reason I called is, you know, it would be nice if the senators, the congressmen we send to Washington would step back and take a look at what Condi Rice said to the Europeans just the other day.
She said, hey, our purpose is good.
Our cause is great.
We're going to interrogate these terrorists.
And they're so afraid in Washington to just say this stuff is necessary, what we're doing there, instead of cowering and saying, oh, we got to be kind to these terrorists.
We cannot interrogate them.
I know, and it's not just Democrats.
We've got McCain out there trying to come up with this no-torture bill claiming there won't be any compromise on it, yet he's talking to the White House about it.
The whole template is wrong.
I agree.
It seems like the Republicans are not, they're listening to the people who have never voted for them anyway.
Why don't they listen to the people who put them there?
Because they think the mainstream press is more powerful.
And they're responding to the mainstream press.
I hate to say it again, Don, but that's who they're responding to.
They're responding to the press.
And right now, the template is we're evil, we're barbarians, we're running secret prisons, we're torturing people, and we're losing the war anyway, and we don't deserve to win it if we're going to be torturing people.
You have to understand journalists are not Americans anymore.
Journalists are citizens of the world.
Journalists do not choose sides.
Well, they do.
Often enough, it's not us.
It's not their own country.
That's how you get to be an elite journalist and have the objectivity to understand your country can sometimes be wrong, and particularly when a Republican runs it.
And so that's the big test.
And so the Republicans, that's where they live.
They see all this.
They think it's important what the Washington Post, New York Times, all the three networks say, and that's why they respond this way.
And of course, McCain, McCain's just his own explanation.
McCain's, you know, McCain's building up an interesting agenda on which to run for president.
I have that here.
I've got a lot of stuff in store here as the program unfolds today.
But you make an excellent point.
Condi went all over the world to the Europeans.
We're not backing down.
We're fighting a serious war on terror, and we're going to continue to do as long as we're leading the United States.
This is the way we're going to deal with it.
Rush.
Yeah.
Yes, sir.
God bless you.
Oh, thank you, sir.
Good work.
I'll do my best.
Some say it just comes naturally.
I say it's hard work.
In fact, she did.
She told some of these Europeans today, they stodgy, elitist, pointy-headed academics.
She said that some of the intel that we have generated, learned from interrogating these people has saved their lives.
So quit complaining.
That's what she told the Europeans today.
What we're doing is saving your lives.
So stop complaining about it.
We're going to continue to try to save your lives and the lives of as many free people in the world as possible.
Here's Chris at Olympia, Washington.
You're next on the EIB network.
Hello, sir.
Dudos, Rush.
You know, this gives a profound thought, but I'll leave those to you.
But what I'd like to say is I hope you remember the last time Americans stormed into a peaceful house, you know, in the pre-dawn dark hours to terrorize the women and children.
Let's see.
Hold on, I want to talk about this.
I want to think about this.
I love these kinds of challenges.
When was the last time, what was the question?
When time, last time Americans stormed into a peaceful house?
Families home a peaceful home in the dark hours of the night to terrorize women and children the way the left claim that we do.
Well, let's see.
The Waco invasion was in daylight.
That's close.
So we're not counting that just because it happened in the daytime.
We sent tanks and ATF in there to blow up the Branch Davidian religious compound.
Janet Reno said.
Janet Reno and Bill Clinton did the same thing in Florida, right near there.
Oh, Alien Gonzalez.
Yes, Alien Gonzalez.
So, yes, it's the Democrats who terrorize and brutalize women and children under cover of dark.
Excellent point, Chris.
And they ripped that innocent boy from that home, that family, and took him back and delivered him into the hands of a tyrant, a leftist tyrant, a communist.
And I think the reason why they defend tyrants so much is because they have so much in common.
The left has so much in common with the tyrants and the dictators and the thugs that I think that's why they secretly defend them.
And that's why Ramsey Clark.
What would JFK or Bobby Kennedy do in that same situation in 1960?
What would Ramsey Clark do?
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Well, hold it.
Hold it a sec.
Okay, I'm mad.
No, wait a minute now.
That's actually a great question because in the New York Times over the weekend, Theodore Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. actually wrote a piece about what would JFK do in Iraq.
And Ramesh Panuru at National Review Online had a pretty good answer.
Well, if JFK were president during this period of time, the first thing, I got to find it because I have to paraphrase it.
But the first thing he would have done would be go hire the mob to try to take out Saddam.
Then he would have tried to CIA to send a fake cigar that would explode in, what's his name, Hussein's face.
And then he would have betted one of the mafia's mistresses, Judith Exner, or a whole bunch of them.
And we know what JFK would have done.
These guys are writing this story.
What would JFK have done trying to recreate Campbell out here?
Because there's no current Democrat.
What would John Kerry do?
Cut and run.
What would John Murthy do?
Cut and run.
What would Ted Kennedy do?
Cut and run.
So they can't write that piece.
So they had to go back to JFK.
Now, I'm not trying to put JFK down, please, because I love JFK on his tax cuts, ask not for your country, ask not what your country can do for you, and all that.
But if you look at what he tried to do with Castro, let's face it, we had the Bay of Pigs, and we had the exploding cigar, and we had the mob hired to take him out, or such was the story, and then a number of other things.
Then Judith Exner, we know what JFK would have done.
What were you going to say JFK would have done?
Well, that's just it.
He defended freedom where he could find freedom to defend.
And, you know, I think the remnants of that are Lieberman and Zell Miller.
And I think that they don't have a national party anymore.
And I think that, you know, I think that that's why the Republicans have maintained this power for 10 years.
And hopefully we won't falter at this point.
Let me tell you something.
As I said last week, the Democrats haven't won over 50% of the popular vote in a presidential race since 1980.
And they're not on track to do so anytime soon.
But one other correction.
This is a national party.
It may not very big at the moment, bigger than you think.
This is the Democratic Party, the American left, and there are a lot of people in this party, you bet, who disagree totally with the notion Saddam is worthless.
They think Bush is the bad guy.
But I love these two examples.
Here's Kerry talking about American troops terrorizing X, Y, and Z, and yet on American soil, Janet Reno twice terrorized American children and a little boy once in the daytime of the Branch Davidian invasion, the Waco invasion, and then the Alien Gonzalez.
And that related stormtrooper dead house one night went in there with armed weapons and so forth and stole that little boy out of the little house and sent him back down to the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
Yeah, interesting.
Okay, great, great illustration.
Keep coming up with these things.
What do you mean I'm M4 now?
I attacked that idiot Kerry.
But I didn't attack JFK.
I love JFK on a couple things.
But if you're going to go back, all I'm saying is if Sorenson and Schlesinger have to write a piece in the New York Times, what would a Democrat do?
They have to go back almost 45 years to find one that might give us a chance.
They can't go back to Jimmy Carter.
They can't go back to McGovern.
They can't go back to Clinton.
What would Bill Clinton do?
Because we know that Clinton led to all of this by not doing enough about it.
They can't go to Kennedy.
What would John Kerry do if he were?
They can't use a modern Democrat.
That's the whole point of the piece.
That's the real upshot of the piece.
What would JFK do?
Okay, fine.
If you say that there's only one Democrat in the last 50 years that we can look to for real leadership on this, say JFK, fine with me.
It wasn't me that attacked JFK.
I'm just quoting Ramesh Panuru, but I happen to agree with him.
It's a great piece.
It's two or three little lines.
I'll see if I can dig it up.
Back after this.
Stay with us.
Here's what Ramesh Panuru said, National Review Online in response to Sorensen and Schlesinger Jr. in their New York Times piece Sunday, what would JFK do?
Ramesh says the answer is obvious, isn't it?
He would have tried to make Saddam's beard fall out.
And if that didn't work, he would have hired Sam Giancana to put a poison pill into his Chevis Regal and soda.
And while Sam was away, he and Judith could get on with things.
You know, this whole piece that these guys wrote is an attempt to equate Vietnam and Iraq, and then to also build up their great hero, JFK.
Both of them worked for him.
But it's just, the funniest thing about it to me is that you still have these two guys that got to go back 45 years to even get close to a Democrat who might have had a pro-American view on this, who said, what did they get rid of Saddam Hussein?
But they don't even take it that far.
You know, the Vietnamese were not trying to kill all non-Muslims the world over.
The Vietnamese just running their own country or so forth.
The idea that there's any sort of similarity or comparison between the war on terror or Iraq in Vietnam is just plain silly.
But by the way, Chuck Schumer, according to Newsmax.com, this is sure to Schumer say this.
Yesterday on WABC-TV is Behind the News, a local Sunday show in New York.
He's predicting failure.
Chuck Schumer predicting failure.
Don't you just love these guys?
Aren't they inspiring?
Senator Schumer predicting failure.
He's just trying to distance himself between himself and Hillary because he is the senior senator there, but nobody knows it.
So Schumer predicting failure for Iraq's democratically elected government, complaining the vote next week to determine the new parliament is being imposed on the Iraqi people by the United States.
There'll be no government in Iraq the way we're trying to structure it now, he said.
They're going to have these elections, but that's sort of being imposed on them.
Let's face the music.
There's three groups in Iraq, and they all hate one another, the Kurds, the Shiites, and the Sunnis.
As long as these groups are asked to come together in any army, any army, they're not going to fight as a cohesive force, and it won't be a cohesive government.
So we're imposing freedom.
We're imposing democracy, and now we're imposing elections.
Way to go, Senator.
These people just keep outdoing themselves.
They think they're really on a roll with this.
And they think they got there.
This is already a winner for them.
I just, I continue to maintain that they're simply redoing the McGovern strategy of 1972, which led to their giant loss in a landslide.
What really got them to power was Watergate after that.
I'm sure they're going to try to make a Watergate out of something and impeach Bush if they can get us out of a rock like they did in Vietnam.
They're just revisiting their glory years in the past because they've got nothing to offer for the future.
From the International Herald Tribune yesterday, hold on to your gas guzzlers, folks.
Cheap oil may once again be just around the corner, even as consumers worry about high gas prices and rising heating bills.
Oil executives in London, Texas, and Saudi Arabia seem to be concerned about a prospect of falling oil prices.
In a recent speech in Singapore, John Brown, the chief executive of BP, spoke of a possible sharp drop in prices and called current levels unsustainably high.
John Hofmeister, the head of Shell Oil in the U.S., said during an interview: This high price cycle is artificially inflated and it can't be sustained.
Now, that quote's going to, oh, that's going to titillate some people.
Artificially inflated.
I think most of that due to the futures market, but it's really the law of supply and demand here at work.
The notion of a steep fall off in energy prices may seem far-fetched.
Then they go in to give all the reasons why it may seem far-fetched.
And then the rest of the story talks about predicting the future in oil is more art than science.
But they're convinced these oil companies are.
And the prices have been coming down, and they're coming down pretty fast.
They're under two bucks a gallon.
Buck 88 last I heard in Atlantic City and parts of New Jersey.
So, and George Will had a piece yesterday: windbag windfall.
He starts off with a quote from Edward Gibbon in the history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire: a locrian who proposed any new law stood forth in the assembly of the people with a cord round his neck.
And if the law was rejected, the innovator was instantly strangled.
If Congress had this rule, it's a people from ancient Greece, it would have been fatal to Senator Byron Dorgan, the North Dakota Democrat.
He recently got 34 colleagues, none of them Republicans, to vote for his measure to punish oil companies for earning profits which, relative to revenues, were unimpressive.
Dorgan's measure also would have inflicted collateral damage on everybody who buys petroleum products and would have injured millions of Americans, many of them currently inciting Congress to smite the oil companies who don't know that they own oil stocks, here with an after-action analysis of a battle that has been fought before and will be again.
None of us know much about what's happening with respect to pricing, said Dorgan.
But quickly recovering from uncharacteristic humility, Dorgan joined Senate colleagues in exhibitionistic indignation about the fact that the five largest oil companies, led by ExxonMobil's $9.9 billion, had combined third-quarter profits of $32.8 billion.
ExxonMobil, which has more than 50 billion of past profits invested in energy development projects, made $0.9.8 cents per dollar of sales, much less than the $0.21.2 cents made by a company selling another fluid that lubricates American life, Coca-Cola.
Nevertheless, Charles Grassley, the increasingly eccentric Iowa Republican who chairs the Finance Committee, admonished the oil companies to contribute 10% of their third quarter profits to augment existing federal subsidies that help some Americans pay their heating bills.
Many of those Americans live in the Northeast and vote for liberals who in Congress write this narrative.
By blocking much drilling in Alaska and offshore, Congress does nothing to improve the price of oil.
Then, Congress spends taxpayer dollars to soften the impact of the price, thereby encouraging consumption that raises the price.
Then, Grassley asks oil executives to join the moral grandstanding by squandering their shareholders' wealth, diverting it to protect oil customers from consequences of their representatives' irrationality.
That's a long way of saying that these people are a bunch of hypocrites.
They're the reason energy prices in this country are so high.
They stand against drilling for our own independent supplies of oil.
Then they demand the oil companies get rid of 10% of their profits, many of which help average investors in America.
It's just silly.
Now, with the price going down, the windfall profits tax failure was a good thing.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back after this.
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