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March 16, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:12
March 16, 2006, Thursday, Hour #3
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Emitting vocal vibrations, rhetoric in residence, coast to coast, on the nation's leading radio talk program.
I am Rush Limbaugh.
This is a program that meets and surpasses all audience expectations on a daily basis.
It's a thrill and a delight to have you with us.
Fastest week in media.
I mean, here we are.
We're already at Thursday.
Telephone number if you'd like to join us today, 800-282-2882.
And the email address is rush at EIBnet.com.
All right.
I want to go back.
Ladies and gentlemen, something that we discussed in earnest on this program yesterday was gasoline prices and Drive-By Media revved up panic about notice that there's no, it was a one-day story thanks to this AAA thing chronicling the increase in gasoline prices.
The average price in the country was up seven cents over the last time it had been checked and measured officially.
And there was a veritable panic.
I had people calling about it yesterday.
And since I don't watch the drive-by meat anymore, I didn't even know what had happened.
I had to go back and retrace myself and inform myself on all this.
And we had a call yesterday, the last call of the day, which accused me of, who accused me of having a pathetic answer.
He was all upset that there's no competition in the gasoline business.
He said there's all kinds of competition in the fast food business.
You got big Burger King, Big McDonald's, Big Kentucky Fried Chicken, Big Pizza Hut.
These people are always offering coupons and discounts, but gasoline stations never do.
And I'm not going to go through the whole answer, but it was a pretty brilliant answer.
I pointed out that gasoline is a commodity.
You can go your whole life without going to Pizza Hut.
You have to eat, but you don't have to go to Pizza.
You don't have to go to Taco Bell.
You don't have to go to wherever.
And I cited big-name restaurants in New York that don't advertise because they don't have to because their word-of-mouth reputation is such that the place is full all the time anyway.
Anyway, it generated a lot of email.
And I want to read you my favorite one.
Rush, you blew it.
Ten minutes before the end of your show today, a guy was on complaining that the gasoline companies don't compete for his business in the way that pizza places compete.
Appalled as I was by his ignorance, I was severely disappointed with your response.
I thought your exposure to Dr. Williams and Dr. Soule would have taught you more economics.
In a perfectly competitive market, all sellers change the same price.
They have to.
Competition is so intense that anyone charging slightly more than others would lose all business, and anyone charging slightly less would be overwhelmed.
Competitive pressures, firms competing with each other push price down to where profits on the margin, not the same as profit margins, are near zero.
If firms charge different prices for the same thing, that is prima facie evidence of imperfect competition.
The caller referred repeatedly to food outlets and their efforts to attract customers.
The caller spoke of this as competition, but it is not competition in the economic sense.
This happens because big pizza and big tacos and big hamburgers are charging different prices for different things.
Because they are not in highly competitive markets, they can afford to offer short-term incentives to attract customers.
I thought I dealt with that in the loss leader analogy.
Their marginal profits, not profit margins, their marginal profits are very high.
The ingredients in a pizza that might sell for $15 typically cost less than $5.
So offering half-off to attract new customers who buy $5 pizzas for $7.50 is good business.
Pizza Hut can afford to compete in the caller's mind for business because it is not in a competitive market.
Exxon is forced to compete for every gallon of gasoline sold.
The competition is so intense and perpetual that the public soon becomes inured to it, kind of like becoming accustomed to the taste of local water.
How can a company with near zero marginal profits have substantial profit margins?
Sharply, upwardly sloping supply curves.
Ask Dr. Williams.
A peripheral point.
There is no such thing as the capitalist system.
System indicates there is design and intent.
The term capitalist system probably was invented by anti-capitalists who wanted to establish moral equivalence between their artificial system, i.e. socialism, and what happens without their system.
What we call capitalism is what happens automatically when people have liberty, specifically when they are at liberty to buy and sell things, including their labor and their savings.
Capitalism was what happens in the absence of a system.
Anti-capitalists cannot imagine that anything could exist, much less work, without a system designed and controlled by somebody with a genius comparable to their own.
Anti-capitalists see injustices in the natural order of things, so they assume there must be an evil elite running capitalism.
Thus, capitalism must be a system invented by that evil elite for their own selfish ends.
As the anti-capitalist elite assumes that only an elite could make anything happen, they style themselves as the noble elite, doing cosmic battle with the evil elite to the benefit of mankind.
It's almost the world of Norse mythology.
Odins and Thors and Freyas of social justice battling the dark, selfish gods of greed, exploitation, and slavery.
It must be wonderful to be Thor in an academic Asgard doing cosmic battle with the likes of Loki and Fenrir ensconced in corporate boardrooms in a Republican White House.
You know, I'm sure there's some of this.
This is from Greg Norton, respectfully.
He signed it respectfully.
The point he's making is that there is constant competition in big gasoline for your business.
And where do you see the competition?
Well, when you drive by the station, they post the price bigger than life.
That's and it's as we pointed out in a two-mile stretch outside the DC Beltway.
The price of regular self-pump, self-serve regular ranged from $2.19 to $2.45.
And all those stations had business.
They all had the gasoline station selling gasoline at $245 was not empty, while the one selling it at $2.19 had lions around the corner.
They were all busy.
They all had customers.
What's the difference in price?
That's where people get all confused and start wondering about conspiracies and so forth.
This point that he made, though, that's interesting to me is about the capitalist system.
He's absolutely right in his definition of how people try to denigrate it.
That's just a competing set of ideas.
And it's not.
Capitalism is what's natural when people have freedom.
It's sort of like there's a saying.
It's an old tired, almost worn-out saying among political scientists, but it's true.
And here it is.
Any organization, any group, any whatever of people who do not adhere daily to principles of conservatism will automatically become liberal.
In other words, you have to have a set of principles based on beliefs and so forth and stick to them.
If you don't, you'll become a liberal.
It's easy.
It's the most gutless choice you can make.
It happened to the Ford Foundation.
None of these big foundations, the Ford Foundation, so many of these big names sound.
They all were started by great capitalist conservatives, and they were eventually taken over by a bunch of people who were not conservative, and so they become liberal.
And that's why we conservatives are so insistent on continually espousing conservative principles that people can learn from, follow, because they are the orienting things in life.
They're the things that give guardrails to society, if you will.
They're the things that promote freedom, the things that promote independence, prosperity, opportunity, and so forth.
And if you ever let go of those things, you will automatically not be that.
And when you are not that, you are liberal.
So capitalism is simply what is when people have freedom to compete, to buy and sell, including themselves, or whatever the product or commodity is.
But I'll tell you, the anti-capitalists are large in their profound because he's exactly right.
They think, since socialism is a system, they do Marx to design it.
They think somebody somewhere designed capitalism and that the people that did that are mean-spirited and selfish and have designed a system where they enrich themselves at the expense of everybody else.
And so they are bad people.
Capitalists are rotten because capitalists choose life's winners.
And by definition, they would be choosing life's losers.
And so the egalitarians come along.
This is most unfair.
This is simply most unfair.
We must stand for the people who are being discriminated against and who are not being chosen and who are being stolen from and robbed from.
That's where you get the theory that the homeless are homeless because tax cuts for the rich have taken money away from the poor.
It makes no sense whatsoever.
But to the socialists, to the liberals, it makes total sense because they think there's some, just like you think there's some guy somewhere setting the gasoline price, liberals think that there's an elite cabal of selfish, mean-spirited extremists out there determining who gets what, and most of it is going to be gotten by them.
And to get it, they steal it from the good people.
So he's exactly right about that point.
A quick timeout.
We will be back.
We will continue.
Your phone calls next, among other things, in a jiffy.
Let me go down to line five.
I got to take care of this.
Well, we'll come back up to Kalamazoo in a moment.
Here's Susan in Newton, New Jersey.
Susan, hi, welcome to the program.
Thank you so much, Rush.
It's an honor.
I have in my hands my National Review that just arrived, I guess, yesterday, March 27th issue.
And in the week column, they talk about that Dogby poll.
They also point out that the same survey says 42% of the troops do not understand the U.S. mission, and 85% think that they went to war because Saddam Hussein was involved in 9-11.
But then they go on and talk about how manipulative and confusing the questions were.
Apparently, you at and Dwayne Patterson, who are bloggers, got the questions and went through it and just said it was atrocious.
Well, the controversy deepens.
Apparently, this is a March 1st is when the Christian Science Monitor story appeared reporting this poll.
And that goes back to, that's about just a little over two weeks ago.
Are you still there?
I heard a click on the line.
I'm still here.
Okay.
And I have a vague memory of this, but I didn't talk about it at all.
And I see the story here that goes back two weeks or longer to March 1st.
It probably came out even earlier than that in the Stars and Stripes.
And I just have a vague memory of this.
And where I happen to have come down on this is that it seems like every poll we get, I'm becoming immune to them.
They're starting to just all run together and sound the same.
And so we had a poll.
And my vague memory is got a poll.
The troops think we ought to get out.
Well, everybody thinks we ought to get out.
They're trying to paint a picture.
Everybody's trying to paint a picture.
We ought to get out.
I do know you can take a poll and get the results you want.
Now, what you've just told me, I also remember that National Review had done some work and had some people look at this and sort of taken it apart.
But I got an email during the break from a guy named Max Stansbury, who is a subscriber at the website.
Emailers to be very insulting the past two days, I must say.
Stansbury said, I can't believe it.
You've been going on two weeks.
And where were you?
You were all caught up in the ports deal.
But he thinks the poll's good.
And he sent me, he's got a little blog.
And he said, I don't know who he is.
He just, but he's a subscriber to my website, so he's worth something.
And he thinks the poll was good.
So there's a raging controversy about this.
But the bottom line, what does it mean to you?
Let's say, Susan, for a second, forget what National Review has said.
And let's say that the poll is accurate.
What does that mean to you?
What's the practical, what does it make you feel like?
It means nothing.
I hear the words poll come on anymore, and I think I have the same reaction you do.
I just turn it right off.
No, but I mean, let's say, I'm changing the rules.
Let's say that you believe it.
You say, okay, gosh, 73% of the troops want to get out of there in a year.
What kind of reaction is that causing you?
It has the same reaction that I think your previous caller had, which is, well, gee, I'm not surprised they want to come home and they're ready to come home.
And I guess I would always put a positive spin on it.
I would think to myself, gee, the soldiers must know their mission is almost done.
I'll tell you what my first thought was that the propaganda against the war over here that's also aimed at them may be working.
The demoralization campaign.
Because if they think that it's time to get out of there, they may start.
Hell, they've been bombarded.
I know that the troops, when I was in Afghanistan last year, complained to me about the media when I was there.
How come they're not supporting what we're doing?
How come they're even ignoring us in Afghanistan?
It's well, they're ignoring you because there's no bad news here.
But one of my first thoughts was that this is a campaign that has been designed to demoralize everybody, including the troops, by people who claim they support them.
And so my first thought was, well, what if it's working?
What if this, I don't see him going AWOL, I don't see him leaving, and every report I get from people I trust who've been over there do nothing but sing their praises.
So I think my first fear thought was wrong, that they're not demoralized.
And then I got on to what you just said and what the caller said.
Well, of course, you know, war is hell.
Very few people actually want to stay in one.
The objective is to win it and get out as quickly as you can.
That's everybody's objective.
So in truth, I think much ado was made over this because the bottom line is the troops don't determine when they come home.
They don't determine when they go.
They don't determine where they go.
They don't determine when they come home.
And so you can go take a poll of what they think.
And then if you get what you want in the poll, you publicize it.
And that's to further demoralize the American people.
Oh, my God, the troops don't even want, oh, this is horrible.
We got to get out of it.
And I think it's all been part of a five-year campaign to gin up anti-American support in this country.
And the media thinks they've succeeded with it.
Which is why today is so important and funny, because Bush is saber-rattling on Iraq, and he's saying, hey, we are going to sustain our preemptive war doctrine.
We're going to take steps, if we think necessary, to stop an attack against us before one's happened.
We're going to do that.
And they just can't stand it today.
Media cannot stand this.
Why, he ought to be governing by the polls.
He ought to be listening to the American people.
And the reason, as I say, folks, the reason that the media and everybody else wants him to listen to the polls is because they aren't manly.
These people in the press and on the left, they are not manly.
They're uncomfortable with Bush's manliness.
Because manly men lead, and they're confident in their own beliefs.
And they take risks to assert those beliefs.
Like I did during the Ports deal.
But a bunch of unmanly, feminized guys will just hang around and wait for the safety of consensus.
They'll wait for a poll or they'll wait for a majority to form and that'll give them cover.
Well, yes, we can pull out now.
And if things go wrong, hey, I was just doing what the American people wanted me to do.
Hey, I was just following the will of the American people.
Second thing Bush did today was affirm the position in Iraq.
And even Rumsfeld's making noises about increased troop levels for a short period of time in the future.
And this has got them baddie.
They're going baddie.
Can't believe it.
And he didn't admit any mistakes.
He didn't admit that things have gone wrong.
He didn't admit that he screwed up.
And they're just beside themselves because Bush isn't listening to them.
So there's a lot of things wrapped up into this.
But when you get down to brass tacks, a poll of 994 troops in Iraq by the Le Moyne College's Center for Peace and Global Studies actually turns out to be irrelevant because the troops are not in charge of whether they go or stay, and they're not in charge of where they go.
It's only relevant if it indicates that there's a worsened morale, no morale, and this means they've quit.
And based on what we see today with the largest air operation since the war began in 2003, I don't think they've quit.
So in a long, roundabout way, which has included some vamping in order to get to the commercial break here, what I'm trying to tell you is that as far as I'm concerned, ladies and gentlemen, this poll about which I've just spent 10 minutes talking is worth.
And we'll be back.
All right, as you people watching on the Ditto Cam know, I have been feverishly working during the most recent EIB Profit Center timeout.
We've been digging deep here, folks.
Le Moyne College has quite a rich anti-war history.
On October 15th, 1965, the first man to burn his draft card in protest of the Vietnam War after it became a felony to do so was not a long-haired, wild-eyed product of Columbia, Harvard, or Yale, nor was he a student or student at or alumni of the University of California at Berkeley.
After attending HasScruel at Christian Brothers Academy, David Miller, the first man to burn his draft card in protest when it became a felony, graduated in 1965 from Lemoyne College, a relatively small Catholic liberal arts college run by Jesuit priests on the eastern fringes of Syracuse.
The day he burned his draft card in New York City, he was dressed in a suit and tie, was wearing a short haircut.
Miller had spent the summer of 65 in the Big Apple working as a Catholic worker volunteer in their House of Hospitality, which Dorothy Day founded.
Uh-huh.
So the first draft card-burning felon is a graduate of Le Moyne College.
Lemoyne College funded the poll in Stars and Stripes that founded 73% of the troops think we ought to get out of Iraq in a year or less.
We have also learned that the pollster himself, John Zogby, is a graduate of Le Moyne College.
Also, I think attended Syracuse.
It turns out that Zogby is now a trustee at Le Moyne and got its alumni award in 2000.
We can make a pretty good George Soros commercial out of this.
So you've got Le Moyne College with anti-war roots back to the guy who first burned his draft card when it was a felony in 65, all the way up to this poll with one of its own trustees being paid by the school to do the poll, of which he was given the alumni award in 2000.
I'm not saying it has anything to do with the port deal.
I'm just saying it's very interesting.
Very, very interesting.
Becky in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Welcome to the program.
Oh, my gosh.
I am so excited.
Thank you for calling.
I'm excited you're here, too.
Well, my husband is in Lanchetto, Germany, and I am so sick of hearing about all these things that are not true.
I'm sick of polls.
I'm sick of people that make stupid polls.
My husband is in L'Achdale, Germany, having knee surgery.
All of the wounded guys that can and want to go back, he did an informal poll.
Ninety percent of the guys he talked to can't wait to get back and finish a job.
They're so sick of the.
I'm.
Oh, you know how mad I am.
It makes sense.
I'm glad you said that.
That's right.
They've done the same thing at Walter Reed and at Bethesda.
And they've gone in.
And I've even met some of these.
National Review.
It comes up again.
National Review, 50th Anniversary Bash last fall was in Washington, and some of their special guests were war vets that had been temporarily let out of Walter Reed and Bethesda that night to come and be honored.
And, well, they were eager to get back.
And they didn't fit the model of this poll at all.
My kids are sacrificing.
My husband's been gone since June.
So my kids sacrificed this for nothing, according to these idiots.
I don't think so.
That's what they want people to think.
Well, you know what?
They're wrong.
They're totally, totally wrong, and they're doing a big disservice to all these people.
My husband is 47 years old.
You know, I mean, come on.
He has a life, and he's not black.
He has a career.
He's even Jewish.
And he volunteered.
And he volunteered.
And he's been in the military.
He's a reservist, but he's been in 12 years.
And I am sick to death of hearing all this nonsense.
And I wouldn't let him re-enlist if Kerry had become president because I don't trust that man as far as you could throw him.
I am fed up.
I think you're speaking for a lot of Americans who are also fed up with the constant barrage that they're hearing about this.
And I'm so glad you called and shared your passion.
I am so glad that I got to talk to you because my husband is going to go a long way towards making him better.
Well, you give him our thanks and our respect and love.
Will you do that?
I will do that 100%.
You have a great one.
Thank you, Becky.
You too.
That's the sentiment the American people need to hear and see.
That's the testimony that they need to hear about rather than this constant barrage of doom, gloom, negatism.
We can't win.
We're killing anything, women and children.
John Kerry himself said American troops going in the homes of Iraqis at night, terrorizing women and children, disrupting religious ceremonies and blah, blah, blah.
Dick in Kalamazoo, Michigan, thanks for waiting.
I'm glad you called.
Hey, so am I. Thanks, Rush.
Listen, I'm not part of the disenfranchised base that was referred to earlier.
As I recall George Bush laying this out originally, he talked specifically about his reasons.
He talked about the threat.
Everybody hangs on the weapons of mass destruction.
They forget he talked about the statesmanlike theories of changing that region because it festers and it breeds the trouble that we've had.
He also said it was not going to be easy and it was going to take a long time.
He absolutely is on track and has been consistent with everything he said at the beginning.
He is a statesman that makes decisions on core values and American values, which is really rare.
But I want to caution the American people if they're trying to draw similarities to Vietnam, only if it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
They once talked us out of engagement in Vietnam for which they will never get a thank you card from the South Vietnamese people.
But I want them to think this time that if they're successful in talking us into disengaging this time, it's not going to be another people that falls behind the Iron Curtain, so to speak.
It's going to be us.
It's always been a challenge as when to engage.
You go back to Patrick Henry's speech, which we know those famous phrase, give me liberty or give me death.
You could do a service to your readers and post the whole thing on your website because if you read through that, it is a powerful statement and a powerful argument saying, what are you people thinking of?
Why do you have your heads in the sand?
Look what's going on.
It's now.
It's already begun.
And I thank God George Bush is president.
And to the lady who called before me, I would offer that I have a tremendous amount of friends that are Vietnam veterans.
I'm a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam.
And I know 12 in my little town, nine of whom tried to join up again when this started.
That's the kind of sentiment that's out there.
And I would go right now if I could.
God bless you, sir.
I have two calls in a row here who are grand slams.
There's nothing I can add to this.
You just did a great job.
Thank you.
I appreciate the fact that you hang on to the same American principles and values that George Bush does.
There seem to be no statesmen anymore.
It's all about comfort.
It's all about polls.
It's all about, you know, it's all about power.
Vietnam is the first time, but that took a while.
This is the first war in my memory where there's an active opposition trying to sabotage our effort to beat this enemy.
And the press has done just a horrendous, as you say, almost a constructive job to take the other position.
You have to work, work to ignore that George Bush laid all this out exactly and precisely at the beginning, and it's going exactly the way he said it would.
And he goes out periodically and he gives the speech again, and he gives it again, and he gives it again.
And what's the reaction?
President Bush offered nothing new today in his comments on Iraq.
Blah, President Bush did not acknowledge mistakes today in the ongoing war in Iraq and promised more of the same, basically with a rehash of previous speeches.
All he's done is been consistent and tell people exactly what this is about, how we're going to do it, how hard it is, how long it may take.
He's never sugarcoated anything.
But I'll tell you what's happening here.
There are two things that work, maybe more, but two that stand out in my mind.
One of them is what you get with liberals constantly when they're out of power.
It is their birthright, it's their entitlement, and they don't care what they wreck in their pursuit of reacquiring it.
The second thing is we have more prosperity than anybody ever dreamed that we would have.
And it increases every day.
And because of this prosperity and this freedom, it becomes possible.
We're now at 2006, 9-11 was 2001.
There is a slowly creeping opinion among people who's being fostered by the Democratic Party and the media that 9-11 was an aberration.
And Bush now has exaggerated the threat of terrorism.
And he's exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq.
And he's created a bunch of racists and xenophobes against Arabs because he's constantly trying to make us scared to get out of bed because we might get blown up tomorrow.
The threat levels are always out there at some different color.
So you have, because of the ongoing prosperity and because the constant barrage that comes from the left will do anything, wreck anything in its way to get its power back, you've got people who are beginning to think, and maybe it was an isolated incident 9-11.
Maybe it's not an ongoing threat.
And we can deal with this now and then.
Just part of life in the real world.
But what we don't want to have to do is go to war.
War is ugly.
We must stop the violence.
We can permit all the violence we want, apparently, to occur against us because we deserve it.
Because we're the world's superpower and we're stealing all the world's resources.
And we're plundering the rest of the world into poverty and despair.
While we steal all these resources and become richer and more powerful.
So yeah, we can understand why they hit us.
We can understand why they hate us.
And we can understand when they do it.
And we've got to understand it when that happens.
And we've got to learn to accept it, that this is part of the price we pay for what we've done.
And I kid you not.
That is being taught to your kids in college and even in high school.
What I just said is being taught that we deserve this.
And there are people who rather go back to a 9-11 mentality and period.
And if we get hit again, fine, we'll get hit again.
Except the port deal.
The port deal indicates that that's just the opposite of the truth, isn't it?
The opposition to it?
Why, this country rose up in disgust and outrage and anger.
There was no way that port deal was going to fly.
But if we're in a pre-9-11 mindset and people were having, oh, look at this.
Now Fox is running a poll.
Is Bush now lame duck president?
Our buddies at Fox.
Is Bush a lame duck president?
Oh, they can't.
They can establish that, then they can ignore him.
And that's what that question's about.
You're normally a lame duck after the congressional races in 06, time-wise.
But all I'm saying is, if the majority of this country really thought terrorism was something we can live with, and we don't need to go to war to stop it.
We're just going to take our chances.
It's like flying in an airplane or getting in a car.
You might get hit by a terrorist.
Then there wouldn't have been that much opposition to the ports deal.
But there was.
And that tells me that people are revved up about it and still very much attuned to it, despite the efforts of people to make them think and feel otherwise.
A little long in this segment.
We'll be back with much more in a moment.
All right, Cookie just sent me a story from the Fox News website.
Apparently, Senator Feingold had a press conference this afternoon and mentioned me in this press conference.
No audio of it yet, apparently.
We'll keep a sharp eye out for it.
Although President Bush's authorization of warrantless wiretaps is likely an impeachable offense, Senator Russ Feingold hopes to be a voice of moderation in not pushing the Senate toward that option, the Wisconsin Democrats said Thursday.
Now, how about this lead?
She's not quoting anybody, so it just appears it's her thought opening up this.
This is Liz Porteus or Porteus, I don't know how she pronounces it.
Although President Bush's authorization of warrantless wiretaps is likely an impeachable offense.
Well, now, obviously, Feingold said that, but he's not quoted as saying that.
It just starts out as, hey, everybody knows that's an impeachable offense.
Senator Feingold hopes to be a voice of moderation in not pushing the Senate toward that option.
He's the guy that's got this whole thing started via his censure resolution.
I think it's right in the strike zone of what the founding fathers talked about when they talked about high crimes and misdemeanors, said Feinkold, who introduced his resolution on Monday.
The Constitution doesn't require us to go down the impeachment road, and I hope that in a sense I'm a voice of moderation on this point.
See, people may not even read that far.
They're just going to think, although President Bush's authorization.
You people in the journalism business, this is just irresponsible to put this out this way.
Now, Cookie says this is from Fox, but yeah, it is.
Fox News of Jim Engel and Trish Turner contributed to this report.
Anyway, here's the part that references moi.
Feingold on Thursday, that's today, for those of you in Rio Linda, said that he hopes others will review his censure measure and listen to their constituents back home as Congress heads into a week-long recess before returning on March 27th.
The senator said that while he was seeking a way to help us positively resolve this issue, he was also seeking a pledge from the president that he's going to come within the law or make proposals to change the law to allow it.
It has already been proclaimed legal.
Feingold said that he wanted to counter the Washington spin machine, and he had this warning for Republican attackers.
Quote, if the right wing really believes in this country that Rush Limbaugh and others, that they can somehow turn the president's reputation around by saying, you darn right he violated the law and it's a good thing, I think they're just as confused as they are about their Iraq policy.
People aren't buying it anymore.
Not only do I not regret it, I felt an absolute obligation to do it.
You know what's brought this on is this New York Times story.
I'll get there in just a second.
Hang on.
What's bringing this on is this New York Times story today, where the Republicans are out there saying, keep going, Senator, keep going.
You've given us a gift.
That's what I said.
I'm quoted throughout this story today.
You gave us a present.
You gave us a gift.
Now, I have never said that it's okay for the president to break the law.
If the right wing really believes in this country that Rush Limbaugh and others, that they can somehow turn the president's reputation around by saying, you darn right he violated a law.
It's a good, I have never said he violated a law.
It's the exact opposite.
I've cited the sources who've said he's not violated the law.
Members of Congress were told about this.
This continues to be a gift.
Senator Feingold continues to show us exactly who they are.
What are you blowing a gasket in there?
Well, I know he's he's not, Snurdley is saying he's a total moron if he can't get that right.
You misunderstood.
He's not trying to get it right.
He's trying to characterize it in such a way his buddies in the media will portray that I'm out there saying it's okay for the president to break the law.
He's not a moron at all.
And it's work.
Look at the story's lead.
Although President Bush's authorization of warrantless wiretaps is likely an impeachable offense, so he's got Bush's defenders like me, Clinton.
It's okay.
Bush, the reputation, he can be brought back by breaking the law.
I never said it, and he knows it.
He's trying to get these people in the press to believe a lie.
Well, we've got this program here to counter it.
Don't worry about it in there, Bo.
Back in just a second.
Stay with us.
All right, folks, that's it.
Sadly, out of busy broadcast time.
I'd love to do a fourth hour, but I've got a bunch of hours of tax preparation ahead of me and then a big dinner party tonight, or I will promptly forget it all.
But we have Open Line Friday coming up tomorrow.
I want you to start thinking in advance and early about what it is you want to call about.
I'll see you then.
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