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Jan. 30, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:34
January 30, 2006, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Are you sort of surprised like I am the media has suddenly just awakened to how dangerous things are and can be in military combat?
Well, you would think these people have never had a clue how dangerous combat is until one of their anchors gets hit with one of these bombs over there.
Greetings.
Great to have you, folks.
Here we are, revved up for a brand new week of broadcast excellence.
It's Super Bowl week.
This is the EIB Network and El Rushbow ready to go.
Phone number, if you want to join us, is 800-282-2882.
And the email address is rush at EIBNet.com.
Roll Call magazine reporting that, well, Roll Call is reporting one thing.
And Howard Dean's in big trouble with the Democrat leadership.
He spent all the money.
The Democrats are out of money.
This, notwithstanding the fact the Republicans have raised twice as much, the RNC has raised twice as much as the DNC.
Roll Call magazine says that Democrat leaders on Capitol Hill privately bristling over Howard Dean's management of the Democrat National Committee.
And they've made those sediments clear after new fundraising numbers show that he has spent nearly all of the committee's cash and has little left to support their efforts to gain seats this cycle.
Now, was it was just a few short weeks ago into last year that the whole media template was that the Democrats had already won the House back in 06 and they might even get the Senate.
And of course, with Hillary as the peremptory, perfunctory Democratic presidential nominee, why the White House was theirs in 08.
Now all of a sudden, they're out of money.
I mean, it's what Roll Call says.
Spent nearly all the committee's cash and has little left to support their efforts to gain seats this cycle.
Congressional leaders were furious last week when they learned that the DNC has just $5.5 million in the bank compared to the Republican National Committee's 34 million.
Senate and House minority leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, along with the Senate and House Campaign Committee Chairman Charles Schumer and Rahm Emmanuel, have made their concerns known to Howard Dean.
Emmanuel particularly upset last week upon seeing the latest DNC numbers.
He said a lot of people are scratching their heads as to what's going on.
Another Democratic source familiar with the party fundraising apparatus said there's obvious displeasure among the leaders.
Well, I knew it would come down to money because nothing Dean says is going to upset them.
Nothing he does is going to upset them.
This is a political party that's in the midst of a crackup.
I think it's in the midst of committing suicide.
The Democratic Party's idea of presidential leadership is losing a filibuster.
I mean, all these Democrats getting behind Kennedy and Kerry, oh, support, we don't think it'll work.
And I'm all in favor of Hillary Clinton.
They're all getting behind this.
And the New York, I'm sorry, the Washington Post finally did a story Saturday by Jim VandeHay on what's driving all this, and that's the liberal bloggers.
And it's amazing.
The liberal bloggers do not connect with the American people.
The Democratic Party does not connect with the American people.
The Democratic Party is trying to survive by spin and PR and image.
A Democratic Party is trying to survive by pleasing its fundraising kooks.
But in terms of a substantive agenda, there just isn't one.
And the things that they think are going to illustrate bold leadership like losing a president, losing a filibuster.
I mean, their idea of, look at their idea of creating jobs is to kill off as many Walmarts as they can.
Now, that's not really killing jobs.
That's just preventing non-union jobs from being created.
But it's the same thing.
Their idea of creating jobs is killing Walmart.
Their idea of an energy policy is to tax the oil companies more.
I mean, you know, they set out each and every day to kill a golden goose, and I wonder why it doesn't lay any more gold eggs.
Of course, their goose is actually government, and all it does is scramble eggs, and it doesn't provide much of anything to anybody.
Let's talk.
Oh, and there's one other thing about Harry Reid, and I've got this somewhere in the stack, and I don't recall exactly where, but I'll find it.
But here's the upshot of it.
This Abramoff scandal, you know, Howard Dean tried so, so hard to make sure that everybody understood, because they talk about eggs.
The Abramoff scandal is the latest basket into which they've thrown all their eggs.
And so it can't be that Abramoff ever gave any money to Democrats.
Just can't be.
But it turns out that he did direct agents of his and clients of his to funnel money to Democrats and Republicans.
Now, the Democrats are running, well, we never directly took any money from Abramoff.
We never.
Well, it doesn't matter.
If you're going to go out there and start complaining and whining and moaning about a Republican who took $1,000 or $2,000 from Abramoff, and you've got Dingy Harry over there who's accepted $60,000 from Abramoff clients, you've got a problem.
And even Howard Dean admitted that this is a problem because he's had to come off of this notion that no Democrat ever took a dime directly from Abramoff because it doesn't matter.
Abramoff directed money from his clients or associates to go to certain Democrats.
And Dingy Harry, from what I've been told, is that they're seriously asking him to step down from the leadership position next month because they don't want any hassles as they try to tag this as an exclusive Republican scandal.
So I will find this here in the stack.
See what the UN has unveiled.
The UN most potent threats to life on earth.
And listen to this list.
You've got Slick Willie who flew into Davos to pick up the slack that was left when John Kerry fled to come back to lead the quote-unquote filibuster against Alito.
These guys are over there saying the biggest threat to the United States and to the world is climate change, global warming.
That's the biggest threat.
The absolute big, it's nonsense.
That's absolute nonsense.
You don't even find them discussing at Davos the threat posed by international terrorism.
And this story from, this is the UK Independent, most potent threats to life on earth, global warming, health pandemics, poverty, armed conflict, could be ended by moves that would unlock $7 trillion of previously untapped wealth the UN claims today.
The price and admission that the nation state is an old-fashioned concept that has no role to play in modern globalized world where financial markets have to be harnessed rather than simply condemned.
Rather than simply condemned, in a groundbreaking move, the UN Development Program has drawn up a visionary proposal that has been endorsed by a range of figures, including Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate.
It says an unprecedented outbreak of cooperation between countries applied through six specific financial tools would slice through the Gordian nut of problems that have bedeviled the world for most of the last century.
If its recommendations are accepted, and the authors acknowledge it could take decades for this to happen, it could finally force countries to face up to the fact that their public finance and growth figures conceal the vast damage their economies do to the environment.
the vast damage their economies do to the environment.
Have you heard it said, I used, I heard, I've heard Phil Donahue say this in describing the Republicans at the end of the Cold War.
So the Republican Party, according to this is Phil's theory, and a lot of liberals, the theory is that when the Soviet Union went south and we defeated them in the Cold War, that that took away the enemy, that you always have to have an enemy to keep people in fear.
And the Republicans had to come up with an enemy.
So I forget who it was, Bill Clinton.
I don't know who it was that they came up with, but there always was somebody, the Republican, well, government.
Oh, yeah, government.
Government became the enemy.
The Republicans had to focus people on government as the enemy.
Excuse me.
I think if there's any legitimacy to the theory, the fact of the matter is that the modern environmental movement has taken over or co-opted that place previously occupied ideologically by the Soviet Union of worldwide communism.
Because the environmental movement is basically just the new home for these displaced communists.
And they're the ones, the Democrats are the ones who constantly use fear in crisis.
And their latest fear crisis, and it's been going on a long time now, is the environment.
We're destroying the environment.
Prosperity destroys the environment.
Global warming is a direct result of Americans living longer and better lives.
And so now comes this new trick where we've got to unlock $7 trillion.
And doing this will eliminate all problems, so forth.
Now, sounds like the recipe that some people put in place for New Orleans.
There is no liberal panacea.
There is no way you redistribute anybody else's money and make anything better.
Just doesn't happen.
Folks, there is a worldwide, it's not just contained within the borders of this country.
There is a worldwide liberal crackup taking place.
It is born of a frustration they have never experienced and a feeling of doom and being lost that they do not know how to cope with.
I have to take a break.
We'll come back.
We'll continue in mere moments.
Don't go away.
Yeah, I'm just sitting here reading more of this boulder dash from the UK Independent about this UN plan unveiled at Davos.
I don't know if you people took the time to look at what all is going on over there, but I guarantee if most Americans knew the kind of garbage and trash and idiocy that was being spouted over there, particularly by American representatives, they'd be sick.
They'd be outraged and sick at the kind of stuff being John Kerry getting up and speaking and Gore and Clinton and all these people and the so-called leftist representatives.
Let me give you an example.
At the heart of this proposal to untap $7 trillion of wealth.
Now, this relies in some vaunted economic theory espounded by some Nobel laureate.
At the heart of the proposal, unveiled at a gathering of world business leaders at the Swiss ski resort of Davos, is a push to get countries to account for the cost of failed policies and use the money saved up front to avert crises before they hit.
Folks, this is the kind of gobbledygooky gook that ends up winning Nobel Prizes and then ends up being taught to your kids.
And I defy anybody to define or translate this in any way that makes common sense to get countries to account for the cost of failed policies and use the money saved up front to avert crises before they hit.
The top of the list is a challenge to the United States to join an international pollution permit trading system, which the UN claims could deliver $3.64 trillion of global wealth.
Now, this involves trading pollution rights.
Companies are given the right to pollute so much.
Companies that don't pollute and therefore ostensibly save the world and save money could trade for money, some of their pollution rights to somebody else who wants to buy them in a part of the world that they can't meet the requirements, limitations, and so forth.
This is, it is absolutely insane.
I know the concept is intriguing to pointy-headed economists and so forth, but listen to the lingo here.
Account for the cost of failed policies.
You know where I would go first?
I would go to the Democratic Party of this country since FDR, and I'd say, let's calculate the wasted money on the war on poverty and the great society.
We can calculate at least a $7 trillion transfer of wealth in this country alone.
Let's unlock that.
Let's pretend that we identified it in advance as a failure, because some of us did, because some of us know that redistribution is not going to work.
So let's go just somehow take that $7 trillion back, admit our mistake, and bamo, look at what better shape our economy would be in.
Of course, nobody at this silly forum is going to think the Great Society or the War on Poverty is a failed program.
Oh, no, no, there are no failed liberal programs.
There are only programs with good intentions.
Well, we're not supposed to examine the results of this program.
We're not only supposed to look at the size of the hearts of the people who devised them.
Here's Inga Call, special advisor to this UN agency.
The way we run our economies today is vastly expensive and inefficient because we don't manage risk well and we don't prevent crises.
The way who runs our economy, who runs this economy.
If you go through the list of things that are wrong in the world, you'll find that none of the problems exist in this country, or very few of them do.
She downplayed concerns over upfront costs and interest payments for the newfangled financial devices.
The gains in terms of development would outweigh those costs.
Money is wasted because we dribble aid, and the costs of not solving the problems are much, much higher than what we would have to pay for getting the financial markets to lend the money.
Ever heard of the World Bank?
What have we done?
We've done nothing but lend money and then we forgive the loans.
And we give a Nobel Prize to a rock star who comes up with that idea.
Well, let's just forgive the loan.
Oh, what a compassionate man.
Why?
Here he is out there talking about the United States forgiving its loans because it's not his money he's asking people to forgive and not pay back.
But if you go through this, if you read a whole story, you'll find out disease, pestilence, pandemics, illness, all these things don't exist here.
Anybody wonder why?
Why don't these things exist here?
We don't have a malaria problem here.
The biggest problem is that who is it?
What's her name?
Rachel Carson?
Rachel Carson gets a big award.
Rachel Carson succeeds in getting DDT banned.
Guess what?
We got mosquitoes infesting every part of the world where DDT has been banned.
And people get stung by the mosquitoes or bitten by the mosquitoes and disease gets spread.
Rachel Carson is some sort of giant heroine.
In the meantime, countless millions more people have gotten sick and died because of her success award-winning behavior than otherwise would have if we would have not banned the DDT.
She's the mother of the West Nile disease.
Well, West Nile virus.
Rachel Carson and getting DDD banned, DDT banned, has led to the outgrowth of a whole bunch of new mosquito-borne diseases.
But because DDT poisoned the water in some place, oh, it's desperate, dangerous.
They had to get rid of it.
We can't do this anymore, Russ.
We have to be sensitive.
Blah, That's the voice, by the way, of the American castrati.
Ladies and gentlemen, at any rate, if you look at the one economy in the country that's as close to a free market as you're going to get, that's based entirely on the principle of capitalism.
None of these crises, none of these problems exist.
Oh, we have crises in the minds of some of our people.
But in terms of the crises felt by the vast majority of the people in the world who live under tyrannical regimes, communism, socialism, or some other form of government that denies people individual freedom and basic rights, by the way, regimes endorsed by the American left, like what's his name, Hugo Chavez, the living communist fossil Fidel Castro, any of these other leftist bulldogs, man, the liberals are just yapping at their feet like sycophants that you've never seen before.
And, you know, the problems of the world created by that kind and those variations of those forms of government, we don't have the same problems in this country that they're all discussing and worried about in Davos.
It's tearing us up.
When they say they ought to unlock $7 trillion of wealth, it means how can we rape the U.S. for $7 trillion.
This is a long story, and I'm not going to bore you with the whole thing.
Let me just give you a couple of ideas that they propose.
The scheme, by the way, which is backed by the U.K., France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, was born out of a proposal by Gordon Brown for a larger scheme to double the total aid budget to $100 billion a year.
Now, when it says here that it's backed by the UK, France, Italy, Spain, it means it's backed by people from those countries who went to Davos.
In an endorsement of the report, Mr. Brown said, this shows we can help equip people and countries for a new global economy that combined greater prosperity and fairness, both within and across nations.
These guys think they can manage a global economy.
They can't even manage an economy in a small little podunk nation.
It's the total, most of its budget is the result of gifts, donations, contributions, aid, foreign aid, whatever you want to call it.
And these people now claim they have the expertise to manage a global economy.
You don't manage an economy.
You deregulate it and get out of the way, leaving no room for people like this to even have a job, which would be the best thing overall for most people in the world.
For people to go to Davos to themselves be unemployed and not have a job and not have the ability to tinker in the lives of everybody else would be the best thing we could do for the people of the world.
Just get rid of as much socialism, liberalism, and tyranny as possible.
We have to cut poor countries' borrowing costs by securing the debts against the income from stable parts of their economies.
We have to reduce government debt costs by linking payments to the country's economic output.
And they've got net gain figures associated with all of these moves.
We need an enlarged version of the vaccine scheme.
Whatever the hell a vaccine scheme is, but if you let Rachel Carson anywhere near this plan, there won't be a vaccine for anything.
Got to take a break.
There's the ear-splitting tongue.
We'll be back and continue in mere moments.
You see, we're Cindy Sheehan thinking of challenging Diane Feinstein for her Senate seat in California.
Feinstein doesn't come out and join the filibuster, filibuster effort of Alito.
Feinstein said, well, I support the filibuster.
That has nothing to do with what Cindy Sheehan said.
It's becoming an even bigger comedy than we could write.
Let's go to the audio tapes and discuss the Bob Woodruff accident in Iraq.
This is Elizabeth Vargas today on ABC's Good Morning America.
Host Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson are talking with her and ABC News President David Weston.
And Diane Sawyer says, to that point, being in the Iraqi vehicle was part of the story.
The story right now is the Iraqi troops traveling with the American troops.
Are they prepared enough to take over the security of Iraq so that American forces can come home?
That is the big single issue in Iraq right now.
And I covered the story when I was there.
Bob was out covering the story.
You can't assess their readiness unless you're traveling with them and observing them do their jobs.
All right, so this is basically a scheme here.
The subtext of this: all this is Bush's fault.
The Iraqi troops are not ready.
And our anchorman, Bob Woodruff, is over there.
He has to go with the Iraqis.
He has to go in the armored personnel carrier.
It's just not quite up to snuff.
He has to do that to get the story.
And, of course, he's traveling in this less secure vehicle, but that's what the Iraqi security forces are in.
That's the story.
It's Bush's fault.
Up next is ABC News President David Weston.
And pardon me, I've got a frog in the throat here today, folks.
I'll try not to clear my throat too often in your presence.
Charlie Gibson says, David, in some way, does this change things now and the kinds of risks to be assumed and the kinds of things that reporters might do?
Because this is so high-profile.
And in fact, even though we've had so many reporters already who have died, as Diane mentioned.
My initial reaction is: we've all talked about this as a very real possibility.
But this makes it real.
I mean, we've talked about it.
We knew someone was going to get hurt.
We've discussed it.
What can we do to try to minimize that risk?
How cautious can we be?
But now it's really one of us and two of us, actually.
What choice do we have?
As long as the United States is over there and our men and women are over there and they're in harm's way, this is a story we have every single day.
And what choice do we have but to figure out as best we can how to cover that story?
That's what we do.
Okay, I understand what these people are trying to say here, but I just talk about insensitivity.
The idea that this makes it real.
This is a news organization which participated in the happy count up to a thousand soldier deaths, 1,500 soldier deaths, 2,000 soldier deaths.
That didn't make it real.
This makes it real.
Bob Woodruff and the ABC camberman being hurt.
This makes it real.
The soldiers, well, that's what they do.
They're props.
When they die, we can add up the numbers and we can hope to influence policy with this.
But whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.
This is real.
This is finally real.
Our men and women in uniform get hurt every day over their defending freedom.
Says it's been real to all of us since it began.
But I mean, this is, I guess, it's a new aspect of journalism.
Well, what we report on, you know, that doesn't really happen until it happens to us.
Then it's real.
Now, Gibson then said, and he's talking to David Wright, ABC's David Wright in Baghdad.
He says, well, when the mob went off, Bob Woodruff and his cameraman were in an Iraqi armored vehicle in a convoy of Iraqi soldiers and members of the U.S. 4th Infantry Division.
ABC's David Wright in Baghdad has a minute-by-minute account of what we know about how this happened.
Both of them, when they went out on this assignment, serious veteran war reporters, and they knew full well that this is a dangerous place.
Bob and his team were riding in the lead vehicle in the convoy, an Iraqi light armored personnel carrier, wearing helmets and flak jackets.
They stood in the back hatch taping a stand-up when the explosion hit.
They stood in the back hatch taping a stand-up when the explosion hit.
Now, this just seems to be so out of touch and so far removed from reality.
Serious veteran war reporters, they knew full well this is a dangerous place.
Bob and his team are riding in a lead vehicle.
An Iraqi light armored personnel character, a carrier, wearing helmets and flakjacks, by the body armor, which how long ago was it the media was telling us about how poor the body armor was?
The body armor wasn't working.
American troops didn't have the proper equipment.
They weren't properly equipped.
They weren't properly protected.
Bush and Cheney didn't care.
Rumsfeld should be fired.
And now they're out there saying it was the body armor that literally saved the lives of Bob Woodruff and his cameraman over there.
How fast these 180s are made.
At any rate, it just, it's, I have all the sympathy here in the world for, I mean, I mean, I'm Bob Woodruff.
Don't misunderstand here, folks.
I just think it is instructive to look at what it takes for these people to understand that this is real and that this is dangerous.
They run stories trying to impugn the character and the makeup and the intellect of the armed forces that volunteer to go over there.
We have chronicled these stories for you, at least in newspapers, over the past year.
They're a bunch of hayseeds.
They're a bunch of hicks.
They don't have any future because they live in America.
And as everybody knows, it's 1930s in the American economy, so there is no future.
These people are so dumb and stupid, they can barely get out of high school, much less have a chance to go to college.
And so the Army and running the risk of getting killed, why that's the only chance these people have.
How many stories, if there were one, there were 20, that we chronicled last year.
We don't, you know, we get all of this attention, and I don't mind it, all this attention paid when an anchorman gets hit.
But the average story of a car bomb in Iraq is how the insurgents are winning, how we don't know how to win the peace, but we never get stories of the wounded American man and woman in uniform, not like this.
The disparity here in how reality is defined and how it is even felt is quite stark.
By the way, one more comment, if I may turn back a few moments in time here, one more comment on the fact that the libs at Davos want to manage the world economy.
The liberals in this country have shown they can't even manage the economy, the Democrat National Committee.
They've almost spent all the money that has been raised in this current cycle.
So much so that Howard Dean's in deep doo-doo with leaders of the Democratic Party.
And you watch this Abramoff thing is going to backfire on him, too.
So just be patient.
Now, as to the filibuster, I just got a panicked email from somebody, a subscriber at my website.
Rush, rush, rush, rush.
The Republicans are now one vote short of confirming Alito.
Rush, the filibuster might work.
Rush, what are we going to do?
I don't know what that's about.
I haven't heard anybody say the Democrats have the votes to sustain a filibuster.
I think maybe that's a reaction to that idiot, Lincoln Chafee, who has announced that he's going to vote against Alito.
You have to consider where he's from, the kind of Republicans that vote for him in Rhode Island.
But what you people have to understand, let them do it.
Let them filibuster.
Let them try.
That's good for us.
Their idea of presidential leadership, their way of saying to people, vote for us, because we can say no better than anybody else.
We can filibuster.
We can smear, we can tar people, we can make their wives cry, vote for us for president.
I have it on good authority that Bill Frist and the Senate Republican leadership is, as we speak, working to implement the constitutional or nuclear option should the Democrats actually try this filibuster thing.
Now, the bottom line is this: Alito is going to be confirmed.
The Democrats can either let it happen and let Bush get at his applause line for the vote in the State of the Union tomorrow night, or they can delay it and try to prevent Bush getting the applause line.
Doesn't matter.
Alito is either going to be confirmed in the first week of February.
He's going to be confirmed this afternoon or tomorrow.
One of the two.
But he's going to be confirmed.
And the Democrats want to keep this story alive.
If they want to keep Ted Kennedy and John Kerry front and center, making absolute asses of themselves, then by all means, it's time to employ the cardinal rule.
When somebody wants to be an idiot, you get out of the way and let them.
We'll be back in just a second.
Don't go away, folks.
Say, Coco, at the website, I got an idea.
I'm going to share the idea with all of you here on the Rush Limbaugh program as America's anchorman, as America's truth detector, America's Doctor of Democracy.
I think what with the tragic wounding of ABC reporter and anchor Bob Woodruff and his cameramen, and there have been other journalists who have been kidnapped, right?
Italian journalists kidnapped, threatened to be killed.
Other journalists have been wounded.
Other journalists have been killed.
Daniel Pearl from the Wall Street Journal.
I think that it is time to start, and I'll be the one to do this.
I'll lead the pack again.
I'm used to doing that.
We need to start a running count up, if you will, of journalists wounded and killed in Iraq, just as they did counting up the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq.
And if we got to these sexy numbers of 1,000 and 1,500, then we got stories saying we're only a few deaths away with a gleam in their eyes.
That happened at 1,000.
It happened at 1,500.
It happened at 2,000.
Now, I don't know what the upper limit of our tolerance will be for the number of journalists wounded or killed in Iraq.
But at some point, at some point, we will reach that point, whatever it is, our tolerance will be exposed.
Our tolerance will be maxed out.
And at some point, we will demand the journalists be pulled out.
I have called for journalists to be protected, but apparently it isn't working.
My call for journalists being protected, I was.
You're Snerdley's right.
I was, as always, I'm on the cutting edge here.
But now I think in order to highlight the fact that it's not safe for journalists in war either, because this apparently is a new realization to David Weston at ABC News that war is really dangerous.
And a point was driven home when his anchor was injured, Bob Woodruff, in this explosion over the weekend in Iraq.
And so to raise consciousness, if you will, to the terrible threat posed to journalists in war too.
I mean, who would have thought?
We need to start the running count up as to the number.
We might even want to call Washington, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and see if there's something they can do to make it safer for journalists.
Go and investigate the Army.
Are you making it safe for journalists to come here and cover this war?
Because if you're not, we're going to find a way to penalize you in the workplace, the battlefield.
And what was that about embedded?
Well, we let them continue to be embedded because that's where they get the truth and the reality of war.
Oh, David Bloom.
David Bloom needs to go on the list, very popular NBC reporter.
And Mike Kelly, yeah, this list is getting big.
Prominent names, prominent U.S. journalists, names that we all knew and trusted and liked and relied on.
And now the latest is Bob Woodruff, and thankfully he was not killed.
He's severely wounded, but no brain damage from what I understand, but had some shrapnel and upper body injuries.
But still, it was touch and go there for a while.
And it's really dangerous in war.
Some people don't understand this, apparently, at the networks.
And so we want to do our part.
And if OSHA could go over there and tell the Army and the Navy and the Marines and the Air Force, whoever else, you better make these battlefields safer for these visiting journalists so they can do their jobs.
Well, yeah, Snerdley, you're a step ahead of me.
I was just getting there.
Do you remember, many of you were going to think this is terribly insensitive.
Of course, it's not.
I'm just telling you what was actually reported.
It was a Reuters story, and it has to be at least a year and a half old.
Remember this Reuters story that said battlefield fatalities were down at an all-time record low.
Battlefield fatalities, combat fatalities were at all-time low, and that was not good.
That was not good news.
And we're sitting here stunned over this.
They're trumpeting the news, and it's bad news.
And they said the reason it's bad news is because the reason it's being brought about is that more doctors are being transferred to the front lines to save these wounded people.
In many cases, lives not worth living after they've been wounded as they have been, minus an arm, minus a leg, maybe minus both.
And so we have leftists somewhere.
I forget who the source for Reuters was.
But it was clear here that the battlefield combat fatalities at an all-time low was just unacceptable.
And we figured finally, after we thought about this for a couple of hours, because it literally made no sense, they actually wanted combat fatalities because that would be how the left would gin up anti-war support among the American people.
And Ergo, we were right.
That's how we got the death counts at 1,000 to 1,500 and then up to 2,000.
So now, should we pull a Reuters here and ask the question, is it really the best thing that Bob Woodruff and his cameraman survived?
Who knows what kind of life they're going to have after this?
Who knows?
We'll have to wait and see.
But it may well have been better for them if they had died, according to this Reuters story.
We've got to find that.
I'm sure Di has that somewhere because she's the one that dissected it for us.
But it may be time to sensitize journalists and this kind of networks that it's time to pull out of this quagmire.
This is clearly a quagmire for them.
The death toll and the wounded toll among American journalists is rising.
And this is unacceptable.
It's obvious that people are not going far enough, not doing all they could to make the battlefield safe for these people who they hate.
Just out getting the story, you know.
I mean, why should that be risky?
We got to do something.
Back in just a second.
Stay with us.
All right, we found one version of that story.
It's C.C. Connolly in the Washington Post Thursday, December 9th, 2004.
U.S. combat fatality rate, lowest ever.
Technology and surgical care at the front lines credited with saving lives.
But here's the second paragraph.
But the remarkable life-saving rate has come at the enormous cost.
The incredible life-saving rate has come at the enormous cost of creating a generation of severely wounded young veterans and a severe shortage of military surgeons, wrote Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
So here we got great news, and the pointy-headed liberal elitists begin debating whether or not it's actually welcome.
Is it really good news?
More lives are being saved, but at what cost?
This is just incomprehensible.
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