Rush Limbaugh Program - March 21, 2006, Tuesday, Hour #3

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March 21, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program

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March 21, 2006, Tuesday, Hour #3

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	Yeah, there it is.
	All right.
	All right, just organizing what's left in the stacks of stuff to go for our final hour of broadcast excellence today on the award-winning thrill-packed, ever-exciting, increasingly popular, growing by leaps and bounds, Rush Limbaugh program.
	Great to have you with us, folks.
	Those of you watching on the Ditto Chem.
	I know it's a thrill to be here as well, and we're glad to have you.
	800-282-2882.
	The email address is rush at EIBnet.com.
	By the way, I hope you people who have signed up for our podcast service distributed now through iTunes have noticed that the podcasts are ready 20 minutes after the program's conclusion.
	We're able to mass distribute through the iTunes platform within 20 minutes of the program's conclusion.
	It's cool.
	It's very easy to do.
	All of it's explained at the homepage at rushlimbaugh.com.
	We were talking about School Bus Nagan a moment ago, and he's been holding news conferences today.
	He says that New Orleans is better prepared for the upcoming hurricane season because of stronger flood walls and better evacuation plans.
	Now, I'm sure that one of the things that will assist the better evacuation plans is that there's so not as many people there as there used to be.
	So it's got to be, if the same thing happens, again, it's got to be easier to get fewer people out of there than if it were the same population.
	Have you also noticed AccuWeather, led by the expert there, Joe Bastardi, have predicted that the Northeast is going to get it big with a hurricane this season.
	The Northeast, they're overdue for a big one.
	And Bastardi was out there answering questions about what about global warming?
	Well, global warming.
	No, yeah, it may have something to do, but we're going to get these storms regardless.
	And so now the Northeast media is focusing on this as though it's already a disaster.
	It's already happened.
	But what are we going to do about it?
	It's just, it's funny to watch this.
	I mean, you can make the prediction, and I can understand, you know, trying to get people geared up for something like this, but it just, I just, the attempt here to create panic and fear, it just, I don't know, it disturbs me.
	Did you see this story about people that watch daytime television?
	Older women who say talk shows and soap operas are their favorite TV programs tend to score more poorly on tests of memory, attention, and other cognitive skills.
	Researchers reported Monday.
	We need to ask the question, is it really the fault of daytime TV or are they just stupid to begin with?
	Why else would be watching this crap if it's not stupid to begin with?
	This is bad news for Oprah because basically what the report's saying is daytime TV turns you into a mindless sponge.
	You just sit there, you soak it all up, you have no idea what you're watching, get your feelings going up and down one way or the other, and at the end of the day, you've accomplished nothing.
	Now, next paragraph says that doesn't mean that daytime television is a brain drain since it's not clear there's a direct relationship between the two.
	Well, okay, I took care of that.
	Maybe they're just stupid to begin with.
	Maybe daytime television is not making them stupid.
	Maybe they just show up that way.
	But regardless of the reasons for this, a preference for talk shows and soaps is a marker of something suspicious, said some guy named Joshua Fogel of the Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
	The findings do point to some association between TV choices and intellectual function.
	Have you, Mr. Snerdley, Snerdley watches C-SPAN all day, which has its own, I think, characteristics, but nevertheless, have you watched, have you just flicked around and watched some of this mindless twaddle that is on daytime television?
	It is, I mean, it is.
	It is the bottom of the barrel.
	It is as low rent.
	It's stunning.
	And it aims at lowest common denominator.
	It really takes aim at lowest common denominator and finds it.
	Now, Dr. Joshua Fogel made sure to save his career in this story.
	He said, this doesn't mean Oprah is bad for you.
	However, an older woman's fondness for the show could signal a possible problem.
	Now, what's that?
	Well, this is just the doctor trying to stay alive.
	You don't rip the Oprah, particularly a story like this.
	It doesn't mean Oprah is bad for you, but anytime there's a but, however, an older woman's fondness for the show could signal a possible problem.
	You know what these people need is this show.
	These people need this show.
	And whatever intellectual doldrums they find themselves in, we could cure.
	Also, this from the Washington Business Journal today, the headline, Celebrities Commit $3.1 million to women's radio.
	Greenstone Media has lined up backing from a high-profile group of women to syndicate talk shows for women on FM radio.
	The D.C.-based company has secured $3.1 million in venture capital as part of its first round of funding from investors such as Billie Jean King, Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem, and Rosie O'Donnell.
	Former FCC Commissioner Susan Ness co-founded Greenstone Media last year to create radio programming aimed at women on FM between 25 and 54.
	Other investors include Marta Kaufman, the creator of Friends, Jamie McCourt, president of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Wallace Annenberg, vice president of the Annenberg Foundation.
	Ness said a group of us were lamenting that there's virtually no programming that really targets women on the radio dial.
	And so it's all on television.
	And you see what it's doing to them.
	I mean, this is exactly what we need.
	We need women having, we need to give women more places to talk.
	Is this really what we need?
	Well, I don't know if you call it radio nag.
	I mean, if a national organization for women were sponsoring the network, then you could call it NAG Radio, the National Association of Gals.
	But I don't think these women are pretty much associated with the NAGs.
	I stunned that anybody thinks we need more outlets for women to talk.
	Speaking of women who talk, Laura Ingram just on fire today on the Today Show with James Carville and what's his name, Gregory.
	You know, Gregory yesterday had this in-depth, serious interview with Erica Jong, in which he elucidated from her, elicited from her, her ongoing dream of having an affair with Bill Clinton.
	So today, Gregory takes a step up to talk about Bush and the war in Iraq and so forth.
	And James Carville is also on the show.
	David Gregory says, Laura, the White House made a determination that speaking about the wars candidly is what's important now, and yet it's clear the president's having a hard time being heard.
	The Today Show spends all this money to send people to the Olympics, which is great.
	It was great programming.
	All this money over where in the world is Matt Lauer.
	Bring the Today Show to Iraq.
	Bring the Today Show to Talafar.
	Do the show from the fourth ID at Camp Victory.
	And then when you talk to those soldiers on the ground, when you go out with the Iraqi military, when you talk to the villagers, when you see the children, then I want NBC to report on only the IEDs, only the killings, only the reprisals.
	When people are on the ground, whether it's recently David Ignatius of the Washington Post, whether it's recently, let me finish because you got to go.
	Wait a minute, Laura.
	Wait a second.
	If you want to be fair, first of all, the Today Show went to Iraq.
	Matt Lawrence.
	Can you do a show?
	Can you do a show from Iraq?
	Okay, and we've got a bureau there.
	David, David, to do a show from Iraq means to talk to the Iraqi military, to go out with the Iraqi military, to actually have a conversation with the people instead of reporting from hotel balconies about the latest IEDs going off.
	She nails it.
	That's exactly what they did.
	They were hanging around in a hotel bell.
	That's why whenever a hotel gets blown up, it's breaking news because journalists might have died.
	Or they're covering the news in a hotel on the balcony.
	And they go out and find video of a burning, smoldering vehicle that was blown up by an IED, and that's the news of the day.
	And they don't get out there.
	And if they did, I mean, the stories would obviously be different.
	Well, I don't know about that because whatever doesn't advance the action line is not going to be reported.
	So Gregory moves to Carville, who, by the way, just I'm just told closed the deal on a vacation home at Area 51.
	And Gregory says, James, the president wants your advice.
	What would you tell him?
	This is not going to be a blossoming democracy that's going to be a beacon for the world, anything like that.
	Certainly not in the next couple of years.
	Talk about the consequences of failure, a regional civil war, what it could mean.
	You know, it's not working, sir.
	You've got to change things.
	You have to, you know, you got to consider maybe partitioning the country at some point.
	They want to be put heat on the Iraqis.
	Tell them that we're not there forever.
	You have to take more and more control of your own country.
	But I think that that's what they have to do.
	All of this press bashing and this is silliness about 80 reporters have died over there.
	And is the coverage been perfect?
	No.
	But the truth of the matter is, is that by the Iraqis' own estimation, they're in the middle of a civil war.
	We shouldn't deny facts.
	We shouldn't attack messages.
	We should deal with facts on the ground.
	That's what they've refused to do.
	That's what their allies refuse to do.
	They don't admit that they're in a civil war.
	It's the exact Zarqawi and al-Qaeda are trying to foment and create.
	And they've got aides and assistants in this country trying to help them along.
	And they are the U.S. media and the Democratic Party.
	But note this.
	Now, here we're having a discussion on manliness today.
	And Carville's advice to President Bush, talk about the consequences of failure.
	Now, that would really be inspiring, wouldn't it?
	Anyway, I got to take a quick, brief EIB extreme profit timeout, but we will continue.
	Okay, president had just a tremendous press conference today, bang-up job.
	Subject predominantly covered was Iraq.
	It has been covered extensively, almost wall to wall, since the weekend with the supposed massive hundreds of thousands of long-haired, maggot-infested, dope-smoking FM types marching against the war that never happened.
	200 here, 800 there, 1,000 there.
	It was pitiful.
	It's a pathetic display of anti-war sentiment in this country.
	They had to be embarrassed.
	And we had the third anniversary on Sunday.
	We had the Sunday morning shows devoted to it.
	So I've been trying to counter some of this with alternative items in the news about the Iraq war.
	And I want to recommend two things to you.
	I'm going to read excerpts from one of them here.
	Christopher Hitchens has just an excellent piece.
	This guy is carried a load all by himself in a lot of ways out there in the mainstream press with his guest appearances at PlayTheC.
	He gets invited a lot of places because I think he's a lib, and he is.
	But on the Iraq war, he's mostly exactly right.
	And he has a great piece at opinionjournal.com today, which is the Wall Street Journal's free opinion site.
	Also, we'll link to it at rushlimbaugh.com.
	There's also, you know, one of my favorite blogs, if you will, is called The American Thinker.
	A guy named Thomas Lifson runs it.
	And he's got quite a stable of really intellectually hefty contributors.
	And it's a piece today by a man named J.R. Dunn, who has done a lot of things in life, in addition to being editor for 12 years of the International Military Encyclopedia.
	Now, this prints out to almost nine or ten pages, I believe.
	So I haven't even had a chance to read it all.
	It came to my attention just prior to the program starting today.
	But I want to read just the first, some excerpts here from just the first page.
	And remember the story yesterday from, forget the man's name, but he was from the UK Times, and his theory that the worst thing about the war in Iraq is that we'll not be able to do it again because of the incessant propaganda,
	the investment in defeat that the American left and the American media has, the ongoing never-ending criticism, the demand for failure, the statement that we have failed that's been going on as a drumbeat into the pulse of the American population is going to make future incursions, while necessary, almost impossible to do because they will be deemed failures before they even start.
	Well, this piece has a similar perspective in the sense that Mr. Dunn is convinced that we've already won.
	Prospects of Terror, an inquiry into jihadi alternatives.
	This is just the first of three parts.
	One part today, parts two and three come later.
	The first campaigns of the long war are drawing to a close.
	The jihadis have lost the opening rounds.
	What's next?
	There's an unconscious conviction that what happens next is nothing.
	We go back to everyday life, the way things were before all the unpleasantness in Lower Manhattan and Washington those long years ago.
	We shut out the harmful, hateful world once again.
	We go our own way.
	We forget about jihads and suicide belts and dirty bombs and beheadings and all the other nightmares that have filled our days since 2001.
	Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be in the cards because what happened on 9-11 was not an earthquake over and done with quickly, but a long, slow, and complete reshuffling of the tectonic plates that comprise human civilization, something comparable to the deaths of empires and the passing of eras.
	Such events are not over in a day or a year or a decade.
	They take their time.
	And when it ends at last, the world will be a different place in ways that we now have no way of knowing.
	But the part that we have played in it will, in some shape or form, match our position when it's all over.
	American or European or Arab, Muslim or Christian or secular.
	We are still amid early days, roughly the days of Midway and Guadalcanal and a previous great struggle.
	Not the beginning of the end, as Churchill put it, but the end of the beginning.
	The jihadis have lost Iraq.
	They've lost Afghanistan.
	It's true that fighting continues in both countries, but at this point, it's effectively theater.
	It can't be repeated often enough that the type of war we are involved in is as much political as it is military.
	By any political measure, the jihadis have been routed.
	Their only chance of prevailing was to appeal to the Iraqis and the Afghans as a viable alternative to elected democratic governments.
	No such attempt was ever made.
	Instead, the jihadis have relentlessly made the Iraqis and Afghans suffer.
	Their final chance in Iraq lay in derailing the political process last year, and they failed at this, and now it's over.
	Not the violence.
	There are going to be car bombs going off in Iraq for years to come, unfortunately, but any opportunity of a jihadi victory is gone.
	Now, skepticism on this point is understandable, considering the circumstances.
	Doubters are encouraged to read any of the myriad middle blogs written by soldiers on the spot or the recent reportage from Iraq by Victor Davis Hansen and Ralph Peters.
	It's a sad comment on the nature of the times that anyone relying solely on the legacy media, the drive-by media, it's a sad comment on the nature of the times that anybody relying solely on the drive-by media knows next to nothing of what's actually going on in Iraq, in Afghanistan, or in truth, most other areas of the world.
	The Islamists now have a choice of either changing or fading out the way the anarchists did early in the last century.
	Like the jihadis, the anarchist followers of Galyani and Bakunin, no more than a vague memory today, were an international terror network bent on converting the world to their ideology.
	At a good long run, they set up a lot of bombs.
	They killed a lot of people, but they disappeared at last in the 1920s, leaving behind only a legend far more romantic in tone than it deserves to be.
	It's doubtful the jihadis will fade out yet, not after spending over 20 years organizing and laying the groundwork.
	They may hurt, but they still have a punch.
	According to the Defense Department, at least 18 distinct groups active throughout the Islamic world are currently operating under the al-Qaeda umbrella.
	Organizing has been detected in Europe and elsewhere.
	Al-Qaeda has settled into Gaza, probably the West Bank, and has been detected in Beirut.
	A lot of activity in both places, in no way emblematic of a movement ready to give up.
	But if the jihadis want to continue, they'll need to adapt a strategy, not modify the current one.
	They never have, up to this point, displayed the least signs of ever having a strategy.
	Bin Laden's concept of action appears to have been to make his move, then sit back and wait for Allah to handle arrest.
	Allah has been disinclined to do any such thing.
	In fact, if bin Laden actually believed that Allah's will is revealed in the course of events, he'd more than likely be devoting the rest of his days to prayer and repentance above all else.
	So I just wanted to give you a flavor for this.
	That just takes me to part of page two, and there are six more pages of this to go.
	But it's an attitude, again, J.R. Dunn, editor, International Military Encyclopedia for 12 years.
	This is at theamericanthinker.com, part one of three parts, parts two and three to come later, maybe tomorrow and Thursday.
	But I just want to treat you to all the divergent opinion from people actually informed from someplace other than a hotel balcony in Baghdad about what's going on over there.
	A quick timeout, folks.
	Hang tough.
	We'll be right back.
	Rush Limboy, you're guiding Lyot through times of trouble, confusion, tumult, chaos, hurricane forecasts in March, even though the season doesn't start until June.
	And even the good times.
	800-282-2882.
	Oh, yes, I did want to talk about the San Jose Mercury News guys.
	Yeah, I printed that out, and I got to find out what I did with it.
	But I'll find out.
	I got to go back to the phones.
	People have been waiting patiently here.
	Sally, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
	Welcome.
	Nice to have you with us.
	Mega, stay-at-home mom.
	Subscriber dittos to you, Rush.
	It is a true honor.
	Well, thank you very much.
	I just wanted to let you know, my husband and I were flipping around and we found C-SPAN the other night, and Harvey Mansfield was being interviewed by Naomi Wolfe.
	Okay, hang on.
	Harvey Mansfield is a guy who's upset Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post.
	He's got this book on manliness, and that's what has fed her column and rage today.
	So you watch this guy on C-SPAN.
	Yes.
	And Naomi Wolf, I believe a former Al Gore staffer, definite liber.
	Wait a minute, wait a minute.
	I don't mean to keep interrupting you.
	We're going to mention these names, and I want to make sure people know who this is.
	Naomi Wolfe, one of the early feminists pioneers.
	And her relationship with Gore was that she advised him on what clothes to wear during the 2000 presidential campaign.
	Needed to wear more.
	She had something to say about that.
	Right.
	Needed to wear more earth tones.
	Needed to, you know, it's all phony.
	Don't be who you are, Al, because who you are is a geek.
	So I've got to make you look like a man, like a guy of the earth.
	And it was Naomi Wolfe.
	You'll remember there was a, it was Esquire Magazine.
	You may remember this, Sally.
	It was Esquire Magazine, I think.
	They had a cover story of Al Gore in his new earth tone jeans.
	Yes.
	And everybody was convinced that that photo had been enhanced in the granular area.
	I use that word so people, Riolinda, won't know what I'm talking about.
	You know, the package.
	The package was shadowed there to make it look like, well, you know, and Naomi Wolf was a little bit behind that, supposedly.
	Well, she even made pains to correct Mr. Mansfield that she advised Al Gore not on fashion, but on women's issues.
	However.
	Oh, really?
	Yes, yes.
	She made pains to correct that point.
	So she's disclaiming any relationship to Al Gore and his clothes.
	Correct.
	Yes, apparently.
	But what I really noticed was we just found it comical watching her try to smile through her seething hatred at this man.
	And especially when he was trying to make points about gender differences in areas where men excel, the best she could do was to say that, yes, men could read maps better, and yes, they do die younger, but other than that, she was loath to admit any differences.
	Did Mr. Mansfield at the same time talk about any areas where women happen to be superior to men in anything?
	He did try to.
	However, she was just going after him great guns.
	Really?
	See, I'm glad that you saw that and could tell us about it because it remains one of the central tenets of the Jurassic feminist movement, and that is that there are no gender differences.
	The only reason that there are apparent gender differences is discrimination.
	A patriarchal society discriminating against women.
	And this is what makes people think women can't do this, can't do that, or unlike men.
	But it's what I said earlier, and Sally, I mean this from the bottom of my heart.
	One of the primary objectives of the modern era of the feminist movement, which ginned up in the late 60s, early 70s, was to get women to be more like men.
	Get them to join the same country clubs, join the same business clubs, dress the same way, get on the corporate ladder and try to climb it the same way.
	At the same time, they were trying to make women be more like men.
	They were trying to get men to be more like women.
	They were creating a new castrati.
	They were out there neutering these guys and turning them into what they wanted men to be.
	Total role reversal, which is absolutely wacko.
	And they've succeeded.
	Most of male liberalism is the new castrati.
	If we could just get feminists to have children, then that whole myth would just be destroyed.
	I have a three-year-old son and a one-year-old daughter, and those gender differences are displayed for me each and every day.
	Well, speaking of that, I have actually known liberal couples who tried this.
	Back in the, I guess it was the 70s.
	One of the theories that was postulated by the radical feminists was, if you have a little girl, paint her bedroom blue, give her G.I. Joe.
	Don't give her Barbie.
	Give her guns and this sort of stuff.
	And she's going to grow up to be just like a guy.
	And put your little boy in a pink bedroom and give him Barbie and so forth, and he'll grow up to be just like a girl.
	The theory was we condition infants and young children to be who they are by our own prejudice against the two genders.
	I'm sorry, the three.
	And I know couples that tried it.
	And of course it was BS.
	The guys that grew up with Barbie ended up throwing Barbie as a weapon around and eventually demanded the bedroom get the pink off the walls and so forth.
	And the women tried to nurture G.I. Joe rather than learn what G.I. Joe's mission was.
	The little girls did.
	But see, they can't let this image that there's no difference die or the whole feminist movement goes with it.
	Exactly.
	But thank you for calling, Sally.
	What it led to was, okay, women wanted to be firemen.
	Women wanted to join the fire department.
	Let me be more.
	They wanted to join the police force.
	We had video of this on the old Rush Limbaugh TV show.
	And look, folks, you have to understand, I'm not saying this to offend anybody.
	I'm just a realist.
	We had videotape of women trying to perform some of the physical training that firemen have to go.
	They couldn't do it.
	They couldn't scale the wall.
	They couldn't perform some of the tasks with weights and so forth.
	They had to carry around, lug the hose around.
	They had to lower the standards necessary for women to qualify.
	And that's when people got all upset.
	And the same thing started happening in the military, too.
	You had to lower standards and basic training in order to say that women were qualified.
	Now, this is when I say lower standards, we're just talking about physical things here.
	We're talking about strength and if somebody wants to say that there's no difference in gender that way, they're just blind and refuse to admit the truth.
	But the fact that Naomi Wolfe was caustic to Mr. Mansfield doesn't surprise me because the whole foundation of the modern era feminist movement is that there are no gender differences and the only thing that creates them is discrimination and prejudice.
	Here's Ryan in Newport Beach, California.
	You're next, sir.
	Hello.
	Manly Dittos from sunny Newport Beach in conservative Orange County.
	Thank you, sir.
	Two points related to the manliness debate.
	First, liberals know that manliness appeals to the vast majority of women in America.
	I mean, that's what prompted the fake kiss between Al Gore and Tipper in 2000.
	He was trying to fake manliness to appeal to women voters.
	With the kiss?
	Yeah, remember the kiss?
	Yeah, you know, I remember that.
	I remembered that.
	And women responded favorably.
	Yeah, they liked it.
	They liked it.
	A lot of us got sick.
	They liked it.
	That's right.
	That was his attempt to appeal to manliness.
	You know, and the other issue is this criticism of manliness isn't a new phenomenon.
	I mean, we're being reminded of it now, but the Libs went after President Reagan for being manly in his second term.
	I mean, he pledged support for the freedom fighters, the Contra Freedom Fighters, and Congress acted in a feminized, nuanced way.
	Well, he stuck to his guns, unlike Kennedy at the Bay of Pigs, and they attempted to scandalize him and bring him down for it.
	Yep.
	Same thing going on here.
	Well, we had a caller earlier today who summed it up pretty well.
	Liberals look at manliness and see chauvinism.
	They see male chauvinist pigs.
	They see sexists.
	They see brutes.
	They see predators.
	You know, the modern feminist movement actually tried.
	I mean, and you guys who all of you are minding your own business one day and had a fight with your wife, and the next day there's a knock on the door, and it's some social services woman saying that the report has come in that you've been brutalizing your child.
	They take the child away from you.
	They tried to establish this notion that the normal orientation, the average man, was predator.
	And so when a guy comes out and writes a book about manliness, why?
	Manliness equals predation, chauvinism, all these things that the feminists have tried to get rid of by creating via neutering the new castrati.
	Quick time out.
	We'll be back.
	Thanks for the call out there, Ryan.
	Stick with us.
	I just got a helpful reminder from Diana Schneider, who is the editor of the Limball Letter.
	Yes, Diana, I did read this note.
	A little inside baseball there, folks.
	She asks me, so Naomi Wolf, wasn't she the one with the whole alpha male concept during the Gore campaign?
	And she's right.
	Now, she brought up the whole concept of the alpha male.
	What is the alpha?
	If the alpha male concept is not manliness, then what is it?
	And the point is, she had to tell Al Gore about it because he wasn't one.
	Al Gore, part of the new castrati.
	So she's having to advise him on a wardrobe which she now disclaims responsibility for.
	She only talked about feminists, whatever.
	But this, I do remember this alpha male business.
	So the whole point was for Al Gore to fake manliness.
	Fake it.
	So this little interview, Sally, that you saw Naomi Wolf do with this Mansfield guy, she was just being phony as she could be because she understands the concept totally and was attempting to get Al Gore to emulate it to fake it because she knew he wasn't.
	And you have to give her credit for this, folks.
	You have to give Naomi Quolf credit for this.
	At least she recognized that liberals lacked the manliness necessary to get elected president and was trying to do something about it, even if it was trying to get Gore to fake it.
	All right, here's this story.
	I mentioned this, had it in a stack yesterday, didn't get to it.
	It's a New York Times story, McClatchy News Newspapers, a company for whom I once worked back in Sacramento.
	They used to own KFBK Sacramento when I was there in 1984.
	They sold it to Westinghouse Broadcasting a couple years after I was there, but they bought the Knight Ritter news chain.
	And in the process, they've incurred a lot of debts.
	They're going to sell to help finance the purchase 12 Knight Ritter newspapers.
	And they've identified which ones based on profit margins and expenses.
	And they have identified the flagship.
	Knight Ritter used to be located in Miami or Fort Lauderdale somewhere in South Florida, but the head honcho moved out to San Jose.
	And the San Jose Mercury News is now a McClatchy newspaper that's going to be sold after being purchased from Knight Ritter.
	And one of the reasons is that it's got very high operating costs.
	Its profit margin is well below the average.
	I think the, according to the New York Times, the San Jose Mercury News profit margin of 9% is well below the average of about 12% for the Knight Ritter papers that McClatchy is keeping.
	And so the people at the San Jose Mercury News are beside themselves.
	It's sort of reminiscent of when Lawrence Tisch bought CBS and did a financial analysis of the whole network and found the news division was bleeding money.
	So we're going to lay off 200 people.
	And Dan Rather and the boy, whoa, what do you mean?
	You're going to hold us to bottom line constraints?
	Why, we're the news division.
	We're immune from bottom line.
	We're public service, saving America, destroying Republicans.
	You can't hold us to bottom line.
	And Larry Tish said, I don't care what you do and who you think you are.
	I'm not going to lose money in your division.
	And these guys at the San Jose Mercury News, according to this New York Times story, are acting somewhat the same, and it's just funny to me.
	When Dan Gilmore first arrived at the San Jose Mercury News in 94, he recalled, he felt like he was in the belly of the beast.
	In his previous job as a tech reporter for the Detroit Free Press, he had trouble getting editors to understand how important the tech story was.
	Now he was at the center of the most vibrant part of the American economy where fortunes in history were being made almost every day.
	We were one of the few newspapers that was growing, said Mr. Gilmore, who with a number of other prominent hires to the Mercury News provided some of the best chronicling of the dot-com bubble era.
	The bubble burst, but Silicon Valley has come back.
	The Mercury News, however, has not.
	Last Monday, the McClatchy Company announced it was buying Knight Ritter at a deal valued at $4.5 billion.
	Also said it would immediately sell 12 of those Knight Ritter papers to help finance the acquisition.
	The Mercury News, which calls itself the user manual for Silicon Valley, was to be jettisoned along with papers in cities like Philadelphia, Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Akron, Ohio.
	And you read the rest of the story, the shock that is coming from these newspaper people is, well, I mean, I don't like to see anybody in pain and suffer, but I've always said that there's an arrogance elitism to people in journalism.
	And they're asking out there, how can people just cavalierly sell this newspaper like it was just another business?
	Don't they know how important we are?
	Well, the newspaper business is like any other business.
	It is a business, and McClatchy needs to finance the purchase.
	No, no, no, no.
	Snerdley just says, is it really money or do they just want to get rid of the kookiest left-wing paper?
	Mr. Snerdley, you won't find a quirkier left-wing bunch than the McClatchy people.
	I mean, they are, they're solid liberals.
	They're totally liberal.
	They're not getting rid of the Mercury News because they're too kooky.
	That was probably one of the things in the plus side to keeping them.
	No, it's a business.
	It's all about you.
	You go out and buy something for $4.5 billion, and you've got to finance the purchase somehow.
	You don't want to keep the properties that you don't think are going to contribute to profit.
	Now, in all fairness, the McClatchy paper chain is a, it is very liberal, but it does have a reputation for not being kooky liberal.
	And it's not like reading the New York Times today.
	They've gone over the edge.
	The local paper down here is just like reading a daily blog.
	The McClatchy chain, the Sacramento Bee, it's got its detractors, but it's journalism.
	They're liberals.
	You know, there's no two ways about it.
	Let me take a brief time out and I'll try to squeeze in a phone call.
	We've got a guy from Luke's Bury.
	If we have time, I'll get him in.
	Back in just a second.
	Okay, got about a minute here.
	Robert in Wilkesbury, Pennsylvania.
	I wanted to get to you, sir.
	Yes, I rush.
	Yeah, the one thing missing seems to be a timetable to get out of Iraq that would tell the people that we're not interested in staying and would help to change us from being a catalyst to this violence that they're responding to to just being a source of support while they're making the transition.
	And all that we have to do really is think about how would we feel if another country came in with soldiers that didn't speak English and occupied our country and then kept permanent bases there.
	So we need to also say, here's our timeline and no permanent bases so that this is your country and we're not going to monopolize your oil.
	But as long as we have permanent bases and people there.
	No, no, no.
	Look, Robert, Robert, Robert, I've been to Afghanistan and I'm going to assume the same circumstances exist in Iraq.
	They don't want us to leave.
	They don't want a permanent departure, but it would be suicidal for everybody involved to announce timeline.
	I know it sounds caring and sensitive and very wise, but it's a stupid idea.
	Thanks for the call.
	You guys have a great day.

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