Rush Limbaugh, America's anchorman, America's truth detector, and the Doctor of Democracy.
All combined as one harmless, lovable little fuzzball here on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, 800-282-2882.
If you'd like to be on the program, once again, I'll get to those of you on the phones El Quicko.
A lot of people want to talk about the Rumsfeld thing.
I'm going to move on to a couple other things here, but stay there.
You're on hold because we want to talk to you.
I got an interesting email from a subscriber to my website, rushlimbaugh.com, named James Ward.
And it talked about the New Jersey smoking ban that went into effect recently last week, the day before it went into effect.
The businesses learned that there were all kinds of things they didn't know about it, such as no smoking within 25 feet of a building, which meant that a lot of restaurant owners had to nix plans and they'd already started to build outdoor decks and patios to accommodate the business of smokers.
25 feet away from your average building puts you smack dab in the middle of the street, effectively making you roadkill if you smoke in New Jersey.
So I got this interesting note, and I've always believed this.
And I read this to you because it echoes some reaction that I have.
I think there's so much hysteria about so much in this country that's irrational.
Everything becomes a crisis and everything becomes hysterical.
And smoking and secondhand smoke is nothing more than an irrational hysteria.
Global warming, nothing more than a man-made global warming, nothing more than a mass irrational hysteria, which can't be supported by facts in any number of issues like this.
But Mr. Ward writes, not only can they not find one documented case of secondhand smoke being the primary cause of death.
And by the way, the quote from New Jersey regarding their new smoking ban is that this ban will save 1,800 lives a year in New Jersey from secondhand smoke.
And Mr. Ward points out, not only can they not find one documented case of secondhand smoke being the primary cause of death, they would also be hard-pressed to find a documented primary cause of death from first-hand smoke.
First-hand smoke.
Now, I know when you hear that, because you've been subjected to this mass hysteria for years, you think I'm going nuts.
You think I'm going Looney Tunes.
And you think this periodically on this program.
You all, I know some of you do all come out with an opinion.
You think, oh my gosh, we're losing it.
And after 18 years of stellar success and a brilliant track record, how anybody could doubt me ever again is beyond me, but I know that it happens.
It's human nature.
So when you hear somebody say, and then you hear me agree with the notion that it would be hard-pressed to find a documented primary cause of death from first-hand smoke, you can't believe it.
Well, here's how they arrive at these massive numbers of deaths attributed to smoking.
Everyone who dies and has ever smoked is counted as a smoking-related death.
Now, we're not saying that smoking is good for you, but how long do you have to smoke before it kills you?
In many cases, something that does no harm, no significant harm for 45 years of activity can't be that bad since we're all going to die anyway.
That may be a shock to some of you at the Center for Science and the Public Interest and so forth, but stop and think about it.
People who smoke smoke 45 years or what takes a long time for the effects of smoking.
In other words, you don't inhale a cigarette and die.
You just don't.
By the way, nicotine is the most powerfully addictive drug on the planet.
You know how I, well, here's the best way to explain it.
I know you don't believe that.
No, come on, Russia.
It's got to be cocaine or crystal meth.
No, no, it's nicotine.
You know how you can tell?
Nobody, nobody, nobody has a pleasant first experience with it, and yet they keep it up.
You ever seen a first-time smoker?
And they keep going.
You feel sick and you swear you're never going to do it again, and bamo.
Unlike most other addictions, which are based on euphoria or pleasure, there's no pleasant first experience with nicotine.
So that's how you know.
Did you see this idiot Hollywood guy?
His name is Eli Roth.
Yeah, he's a director, and he claims that Bush is responsible for the increase in horror movies being made.
Yeah, I'm sure you missed it.
That's why I'm going to tell you about it.
Just when you thought Hollywood had reached the limit of things that they could blame on President Bush, along comes the director of Hostel, Eli Roth.
Roth was a guest on Friday's Cavuto show on Fox when he was asked why horror movies were resurging in such troubling times.
He pointed directly at the Bush administration.
He said that people wanted to scream because of the things going on in the world and the government's failure to help after Hurricane Katrina.
He explained that horror movies offered a safe environment which allowed people to scream.
He went on to say the seemingly never-ending war, fighting people that don't care about our money, our disorganized army, with scared kids for soldiers, and the generals calling for Rumsfeld's resignation were specific reasons for the need of an emotional release offered by horror movies.
He also blamed the Vietnam War for the popularity of movies like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
He then claimed that because things were calm during the Clinton administration, there were fewer horror movies.
But a review of the Carfax Abbey horror movie database debunks all these claims on all levels.
There has been no appreciable increase in horror movies over the past 10 years, just an increase in blood and gut spatter in the movies.
In 97, the movie I Know What You Did Last Summer was released.
Using Roth's line of reasoning, can we relate it to the Clinton administration?
The year 98 brought us disturbing behavior, and I still know what you did last summer, also during the Clinton years.
How about American Psycho released in 2000?
So you might want to say we had more movies about wackos and idiots in 2000 during the Clinton years.
Anyway, this is just the latest example of the attempt by Hollywood to and it shows that I think it illustrates the frustration these people are facing at being unable to influence the popular culture with their with their claptrap.
Now, a couple things on Iran here.
Amir Tahari writing in the UK Telegraph yesterday, the frightening truth of why Iran wants a bomb.
Last Monday, just before he announced that Iran had gate crashed the nuclear club, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad disappeared for several hours.
He was having a calvat, which is a teté with the hidden Imam, the 12th and last of the Imams of Shiism, who went into grand occultation in 1941.
According to Shia lore, the Imam is a messianic figure who, although in hiding, remains the true sovereign of the world.
Anyway, Mahmoud thinks that he has a direct line to the 12th Imam.
He's constantly quoting him, referring to him.
And it is Mahmoud who's out there boasting that the 12th Imam gave him the presidency of Iran for a single task, and that is provoking a clash of civilizations in which the Muslim world led by Iran takes on the infidel West led by the United States and defeats it in a slow but prolonged contest that in military jargon sounds like a low-intensity asymmetrical war.
In Ahmadinejad's analysis, the rising Islamic superpower, Iran, has decisive advantages over the infidel, us.
Islam has four times as many young men fighting age as the West does with its aging populations.
He also says that hundreds of millions of Muslim holy raiders are keen to become martyrs, while Western and American youths love life and they fear death and they won't fight.
Islam also has four-fifths of the world's oil reserves and so controls the lifeblood of the infidel.
And more importantly, the U.S., the only infidel power capable of fighting, is hated by most other nations.
Now, according to this analysis, which has been spelled out in commentaries by Ahmadinejad's strategic guru, Hassan Abbasi, who is known as the Dr. Kissinger of Iran, actually the Dr. Kissinger of Islam, President Bush is an aberration.
He's an exception to the rule under which all American presidents since Truman, when faced with serious setbacks abroad, have run away.
They have respect for Bush.
They're not going to mount any such plan while Bush is in office.
Their current strategy is to wait Bush out, and that by divine coincidence, that corresponds to the time Iran needs to develop its nuclear arsenal, thus matching the only advantage that the infidel enjoys.
Moments after Ahmadinejad announced the atomic miracle, the head of the Iranian nuclear project unveiled plans for manufacturing 54,000 centrifuges to enrich enough uranium for hundreds of nuclear warheads.
We're going into mass production.
Now, they're ratcheting this up and they're blustering and they're talking and they're chatting and they're claiming and they're promising that they're going to get nukes and that they're going to use them and Ahmadinejad is spoiling for war.
But it becomes clear that they've got to wait until Bush is out of office because they fear Bush will actually respond and they don't have their nukes yet and we do.
So all this bluster is taking place for obvious reasons, but it's to buy time for them to continue to get speed with their nuclear program.
As his advisor, the Dr. Kissinger of Islam put it, the Americans are impatient.
At the first sight of a setback, they run away.
We, however, know how to be patient.
We have been weaving carpets for thousands of years.
Now, that's the first half of what I want to explore with you, because the interesting thing to me, it's all very bizarre, and it may be true, but the thing, can we just run around and say it's just bluster?
You know, Churchill had this problem back in the 30s with Hitler.
It's eerie how similar this is.
Hitler was rearming.
He was engaged in turning his population into a bunch of psychos.
He was creating the Nazi Party.
Churchill's out there warning everybody and nobody wanted to listen to him.
And we got the ear of Neville Chamberlain.
And because nobody wanted to listen to Churchill, nobody thought he knew what he was talking about because nobody wanted war.
They just, let him do what he wants to do.
He's not going to attack us.
It doesn't matter.
And there's an eerie parallel here because while the Iranians are doing the same thing, a bunch of experts, that's just bluster.
They can't get a bomb for 10 years.
We don't need to do it.
And we've got all these experts in this country.
If we do anything in Iran, it's going to look just like Iraq.
It's going to be a mistake.
I've got three audio soundbites from noted Democrat Party experts demanding that President Bush not do diddly squat with Iran.
It's eerie, folks, and that's what Mark Stein writes about the Chicago Sun-Times today.
I'll share excerpts of that with you when we get back.
Mark Stein in the Chicago Sun-Times Today policy on Iran nukes seems to be off target.
By the way, those of you on the phones, it's the last little bit here, and then we'll go to you.
So please, please be patient.
I know it's going to be an hour and a half before we get to phone calls, and sometimes that's asking a lot of people.
We appreciate your patience.
As Stein writes about a quarter of the way into his piece, you know what's great fun to do if you're on, say, a flight from Chicago to New York and you're getting a little bored?
Why not play pretend that you're President Ahmadinejad?
Stand up and yell at a loud voice, I've got a bomb.
Next thing you know, the air marshal will be telling people, it's okay, folks, nothing to worry about.
He hasn't got a bomb.
And then the second marshal would say, and even if he did have a bomb, it's highly unlikely he'd ever use it.
Okay, then you, pretending to be Mahmoud, threatened to kill the two Jews seated in row 12, and the stewardess says, relax, everybody.
It's just a harmless rhetorical flourish.
And then a group of passengers in rows four to seven point out, yeah, but it's entirely reasonable of him to have a bomb, given the threatening behavior of the marshals and the cabin crew.
Who wouldn't come on board this plane when the cabin crew and the air marshals are going to be so threatening to the president of Iran?
And that's how it goes.
The more Iran claims they've gone nuclear, the more U.S. intelligence experts insist, no, no, it won't be for another 10 years yet.
The more they conclusively demonstrate their non-compliance with the IAEA, the more the international community warns sternly that if it were proved that Iran were in non-compliance, that could have very grave consequences.
But fortunately, no matter how thoroughly the Iranians non-comply, it's never quite non-compliant enough to rise to the level of grave consequences.
No matter how much they don't agree to what they've promised to do, it still isn't bad enough for anybody to go do anything about it because it never rises to the level of grave consequences.
You can't blame Iran for thinking our enemies can't do a damn thing because we're not doing a damn thing, no matter how much he rattles the cage.
It's not the world's job to prove that the Iranians are bluffing.
The Braggadocio itself is reason enough to act, and prolonged negotiations with a regime that openly admits it's negotiating just for the laughs only damages us further.
The perfect summation of the Iranian approach to negotiations came in this gem of a sentence from the New York Times on July 13th last year.
Iran will resume uranium enrichment if the European Union does not recognize its right to do so, two Iranian nuclear negotiators said in an interview published Thursday.
Now, you got that?
If we don't let Iran go nuclear, they're going to go nuclear.
That position might tax even the nuanced detecting skills of John Kerry.
So they basically said, we don't care what you do.
If you tell us that we can do it, we're going to do it.
If you say we can't, we're going to do it.
By comparison, the Tehran press has a clear-sightedness that American readers can only envy.
A couple of months back, the newspaper Cayenne, owned by the Ayatollah Khomeini, ran an editorial called Our Immortality and the West's Disability, with which it was hard to disagree.
He said this, even if one subscribes to the view that sanctions are a sufficient response to states that threaten to nuke their neighbors, Mohammad Jafar Bedad correctly pointed out that they would have no serious impact on Iran, but they would inflict great damage on those Western economies that take them seriously, which France certainly won't.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post offers the likes of Ronald Asmus, former Deputy Secretary of State under President Clinton, arguing contain Iran, admit Israel to NATO.
Containment's a word that should have died with the Cold War, and certainly after the oil for food revelations.
Aside from the minimal bang for huge numbers of bucks, you can't contain a state.
Under the illusion of containment, events are always moving and usually in favor of the fellow you're trying to contain.
But the idea that the way to contain Iran is to admit Israel to NATO elevates containment from an obsolescent striped pants reflex to the realm of insanity.
Bill Clinton, the Sultan of Swing, gave an interesting speech last week, apropos foreign policy.
He said, anytime somebody in my administration said, if you don't do this, people will think you're weak.
I always ask the same question for eight years.
Can we kill them tomorrow?
If we can kill them tomorrow, then we're not weak.
And we might be wise enough to try to find an alternative way.
Well, the trouble was that tomorrow never came.
From the first World Trade Center attack to Cobar Towers to the African embassy bombings to the USS Cole.
Tomorrow is not a policy.
The Iranians are merely the latest to understand it.
Thank you, President Clinton.
If we can kill tomorrow, that wouldn't have to act today.
I can listen to counsel.
I can listen to advice.
And meanwhile, all these terrorist acts kept happening, but tomorrow never came.
That's excerpts from Mark Stein today.
Chicago Sun-Times policy on Iran nukes seems to be off target.
Now let's go to the audio soundbites.
Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace, we're back to Senator Dodd.
And the question, is it time to leave the U.N. Security Council given the fact that the Chinese and the Russians are dragging their feet in this Iranian nuclear mess and to get a coalition of the willing to impose tough economic sanctions on Iran?
We've basically outsourced the diplomatic option, if you will.
We're on the sidelines here.
We've been leaving it up to the Europeans and others.
Well, hell's bells for crying out loud.
We outsourced diplomacy.
Bush can't win.
With Iraq, he was a cowboy.
He was too unilateral.
He went in there alone, they said.
With Iran, they wanted to be unilateral and go it alone and hell with using our allies in the European Union.
Dianne Feinstein, question from Wolf Blitzer.
Preemptive nuclear attack violates a central tenet of just war.
You think that simply should be removed from the agenda?
Oh, I believe this to my core.
I think a first use of nuclear weapons would put this nation in an immoral position and one that we would regret for decades to come.
We just don't seem to learn our lessons, and I am very worried about the rumors that are going around about some tactical nuclear use.
I just can't believe it's my government that's doing this.
Several of us can't either.
Can't believe it.
So many in our government are like you.
Every time Iran rattles the cage and says we're going nuke and it's going to happen next year, it's not 10 years from, don't worry about it.
They'll never use it.
Stein is right.
We keep coming up with all these reasons not to act.
And in the case of the Democrats, nothing's changed.
We keep finding reasons to blame George W. Bush for it.
The Iranians are ratcheting up.
They're bring Braggadocius.
They've got a leader who claims he's on a religious mission to wipe out the West and his culture and clash of civilizations.
And everybody's worried about what Bush might do about it.
It's just, it is so reminiscent of Churchill in the 30s.
And now we're outsourcing diplomacy instead of going in unilaterally.
You can try to figure it out, folks.
Back in a sec.
Talent on loan from God.
And we are kicking off a brand new week of broadcast excellence from the severely bunkered and mightily secured EIB Southern Command.
Here is Mindy calling from outside Boston.
Nice to have you on the program.
Thank you.
One and a half presidential terms ago, when Bush announced his team to include Rumsfeld, you could hear pens drop in the corridors and the offices of the Pentagon because whether the top brass liked him or hated him, they knew Bush had made the correct choice because he is on the inside.
He knew where the fat was.
He knew what programs to cut.
He was not particularly good for some people's careers, but he was excellent for our young men and women wearing the uniform out in the field.
He came from the inside of the Pentagon.
He knows what's going on.
And I believe, I could be wrong.
However, I believe that this was not a, like you said, a contrived, put-together thing.
I think this is just something that naturally happened at the end.
of a very good man doing a very good and unpopular job.
And it's the organization.
You sound like you have personal information or inside information on the workings of the Pentagon and its condition and status when Rumsfeld was appointed.
I do.
I'm a 30-year career Navy daughter.
I have my own service, a 30-year career Navy husband, and I am the proud mother of a sophomore Marine Razi student.
And yes, when that was going on, I knew a lot.
So you actually, the moment his name was announced as the new sectif, you knew you had a sneaking suspicion that it was going to rattle cages even to this extent?
There was not much, there was no sneaking suspicion.
There were a lot of very grown, intelligent men who were very quiet because they knew what the future would bring in terms of pet programs and looking at a military fault in an old way, how that would affect burgeoning careers.
And Rumsfeld, you can look at his age and you might not understand that he was looking to modernize our military for the benefit of our soldiers.
He was getting rid of programs that were not afraid to put an end to a billion-dollar program, and there's not many men walking on the face of the planet that can do that.
Yeah, you know, you mentioned this, and I forget the weapons system.
And Mindy, thanks very much for the call.
It's fascinating.
Well spoken, I might add, which adds to her credibility.
There was a weapons program that, and this happened early on in the Bush administration.
Yeah, that's what it was.
Some giant, huge artillery gun.
And Rumsfeld, we don't need it.
This is absolutely irrelevant for the future, but it involved lots of money, a big defense contract.
And if I'm not mistaken, I think that's the first time I spoke to Secretary Rumsfeld because there was an outcry then over his killing of that program.
I remember he came on the program to explain why, and he was only on for like five or ten minutes.
By the way, we may have him on at 2.33 this afternoon.
His schedule is, we were told this morning that it was on at 2.33.
They called back later and said, well, schedule is stretching out.
We'll keep you posted.
They called it, it was the Crusader.
That's what it was, the Crusader Artillery Program.
Do a Google on that, and you'll get a memory check on how that roiled everybody, because that was a classic example of a weapon that he said, we don't need this anymore.
It's absurd.
And of course, a lot of people in the Pentagon wanted the weapon, and of course, the defense contractor is going to build it wanted it as well.
And so she's got a point when you cancel billion-dollar programs, which doesn't happen in Washington, you don't make friends as often and as numerous as you will make enemies.
Anyway, the Rumsfeld office called us about a half hour ago and said that the schedule is tightening up, meaning he may have room for us for a couple of minutes here at 2.33.
Here's John in Chesterfield, New Hampshire.
I'm glad you waited.
Welcome to the EIB network, sir.
Hey, Dennis, Rush.
Thank you.
Sir, well, just to follow up a little bit, it was also the Crusader where Secretary White of the Army decided to leave because he was so much behind that, and that really destroyed a lot of members of Congress.
It was really a big deal within the Army.
Who was the Secretary of the Army then?
Secretary White.
Sir John White.
Okay.
He was a brigadier general in the Army.
He was also, he left kind of part of the Enron thing, too.
He was part of Enron, too.
Hey, well, let me talk briefly about H.R. McMasters.
McMasters' book was kind of required reading for the majority of junior officers, field-grade officers, that's majors and below, on just the ability to pinpoint and identify problems with even in the ranks.
It was a really good historical read.
And a point that came out of it was just the importance of the National Guard and the Reserve being in a war, because when you draft only, that means that America is not in the war.
And McMaster said that was a plan by Johnson and McNamara to keep kind of America out of the fight.
Now, McMasters today is a guy who does small unit tactics better than anybody in the Army.
He was in the classic fight in the Gulf War called 73 Eastings with the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment.
They destroyed a force so much bigger than his own.
He was a company size, a troop level.
And he's just an extraordinary guy.
I never met him.
I've only read his stuff.
And he is what the future of the Army is like.
He's just half part diplomat, part soldier, part intellectual.
This is the kind of quality of people that you have coming up through the ranks.
Well, have you heard that he's writing a book?
I have not heard any of that, but that's a good rumor.
That's a Pentagon rumor, probably.
And can I make one point about this?
The Secretary of Defense is an executive.
He's not a legislator like Cohen and Aspen and a bureaucrat like Perry.
He makes decisions.
He's exactly the way he acts exactly the way generals do.
Generals make decisions.
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld makes decisions.
They had it easy in the 90s.
It's not easy anymore, and it shouldn't be.
Now, tell us why.
By the way, you're active military.
I can tell.
You have to be.
No, I'm retired.
I retired.
Okay, but you're military.
You've been there and you've been there and done a lot.
I lived it for 20 years, 20-plus years.
It was great.
But you want people who are decisive and make decisions, people that are malleable.
Okay, tell me, tell my questions.
Why?
You said something very intriguing.
You said they, I'm sure you mean the generals, people in Pentagon, had it easy in the 90s.
Why?
They had it easy because they could actually, the people that were in charge were a little bit more malleable, and they're really focused on Congress.
Well, Congress is no longer in the loop.
And these are decent people, the guys that are complaining.
But it's the same thing.
It's just they're no longer able to have the decision-making because they had Secretary Cohen, Secretary Aspen, and Secretary Perry.
Those guys are all legislators and bureaucrats.
They're not executives like Rumsfeld is.
He's not going to be pushed around.
And like the lady said before me, he's perfect.
You can't, I mean, just look at the way he responded to BRAC rush, the base realignment and closure.
He couldn't be influenced.
It was done.
And that's a great example of him just doing the right thing for the military and particularly for the U.S. taxpayer.
Well, there's no question he has taken the job seriously.
And he's doing what he thinks is the right thing and the best thing to do.
And people can always argue about the results.
But, you know, your point about him being an executive and not a legislator is an excellent one, too, because all these previous secretaries of defense, Cohen was a senator from Maine.
Les Aspen was a congressman from, I think, Wisconsin.
Wisconsin.
And the other guy, Perry, I don't know what his legislative history was.
Rumsfeld was the CEO at GD Searle when they developed, invented, got the patents for, and released to the marketplace aspartame.
He wasn't the Secretary of Defense before, still.
He knew what he was going to do long before he got there.
There was no learning curve.
He went in and changed immediately, just changed it.
And that bothered people.
But that's okay.
I mean, that's why you have executives.
He's a pilot, too.
Pilots cheat dead, man.
They have no fear.
That's why President Bush is a pilot.
These guys are just exceptional.
They worked well together.
When you talk about the 90s and everybody had it easy, I heard your answer about the fact that you had sec defs that were basically legislators, meaning malleable.
They were manipulable.
Manipulative.
You could manipulate them and bend them and shape them.
But how about the fact that during the 90s, the U.S. military was never really put at great risk?
We fought the Bosnia War, but we did this from 15,000 feet.
We didn't send ground troops to too many places.
We pulled ourselves out of Somalia when the going got tough there.
We didn't respond to the first World Trade Center attack in 1993.
Would that be part of the recipe as well?
Well, you just completed the end of the Cold War.
You had what people were calling the peace dividend.
The large ground forces were no longer fashionable.
There was a general named General Gordon R. Sullivan who did everything he could to hold things in place.
And the same thing with General Shinsecki.
I know he's kind of part of the debate, but the intent to make sure that we don't go back to just a shell army and try to hold it together because that's the way personnel costs, as you know, whereas where all the money is outlaid.
It's just very expensive to keep a lot of people in.
So they reduced the structure, the force structure, in many ways, but then they made larger bureaucracies where troops were taken away from the troop units, the combat units, and put into bureaucracies and field operating agencies all over the country.
Rumsfeld, he calls it the water barrel, where he moves the spigot down further down the barrel so you can get more troops and more non-commissioned officers, more junior officers back with the troops where they belong and away from bureaucracies where they're pushing paper.
They don't do any good.
They need to be down in troop units and being more efficient in what they do and not just being taken away from the troops because that's where you gain your experience.
That's what McMaster's believes, too.
He puts a lot of emphasis on keeping kids in the battalions and the brigades and the regiments where they get a lot of experience.
They're better soldiers, better officers, better bang for our buck.
It's interesting that you mentioned Shineski because the French news agency has just posted a story about an hour ago.
And get this headline, Rumsfeld still dogged by clash with Asian American general over Iraq.
Hitting a list of grievances against Defense Secretary Rumsfeld is his reported disregard for the views of military brass, including that of the four-star general who had argued for a robust U.S. troop presence in Iraq.
General Eric Ken Shinesky was the first Asian American four-star general in U.S. history as chief of the U.S. Army, the first person of Asian ancestry to lead a branch of the military.
Some military observers believe, however, that his career hit the skids under Rumsfeld's tenure.
Well, now they're entering race into this.
What does it matter that he's the first Asian American?
They're trying to imply here, and they want the reader to infer that Rumsfeld didn't like the guy because he was the first Asian American, and that's why he disapproved of his plan.
Now, this is this goes to the drive-by media is upset now that they have failed to get rid of Rumsfeld, so they're ratcheting it up.
They're trying to advance the action line.
Now, Rumsfeld is in addition to all the other rotten things he is, he's a racist.
Now, Shanetsky's name was mentioned a lot by John Kerry, who served in Vietnam, by the way, during the 2004 presidential race.
So, I'm detecting something.
You John, a great call.
So, is Mindy from outside Boston.
And we know that throughout this administration, there have been people in the State Department and in the CIA who have been trying to sabotage the Bush administration.
And we've known it since the first plans for war were leaked in the Washington Post, the New York Times.
We've known that there are people in the Pentagon trying to sabotage the Bush administration for a host of reasons.
And this is obviously just the latest incarnation of that.
Quick time out.
We'll be back.
Stay with us.
By the way, back to Iran here for just a second.
It's not just senators and drive-by media types who are blaming Bush for all this Iran business.
Maybe not blaming him, but warning him.
Bush, you're the problem here.
You better not respond.
You better not respond to this.
You better not.
I mean, it's immoral.
It was horrible for the country.
Look what you've done to us in Iraq.
You better not respond to us.
Former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clark has joined the fray.
He was on what show was he on?
Op-ed piece in the New York Times.
And he warned the Bush administration against a military strike on Iran.
He said the administration of Bill Clinton also considered a bombing campaign against Iran amid tensions in the 90s, but after a long debate, the highest levels of the military could not forecast a way in which things would end favorably for the United States, Clark said.
So, yes, exactly.
The Clinton administration was wise, and they were thoughtful, and they were reflective.
They sought the counsel of others.
Look at all the news where Clinton almost did Iraq.
He almost did Iran.
Well, he almost responded to Bin Laden.
He almost did.
But somehow there were wise counsels.
There were brilliant advisors who suggested that we couldn't prevail.
And so we didn't do diddly squat.
That's exactly right.
They nuanced it to death.
And now they want praise for it.
Now they want to be considered the smartest guys in the room.
Denise in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Great to have you with us.
Welcome.
Well, Mega Ditto's rush from an Army wife.
Hello to my husband at Fob Loyalty in Baghdad.
Miss you.
I wanted to add another comment to the talk about the generals.
When you were first reading in the monologue about the comments and playing all the news clips, immediately my thought said, oh, they're generals.
What do you expect?
And I say that because inside the military, we all know that they're very political people.
And to get to where they are, they've had to say the right thing and please the right person.
And I think the caller before me said it well when he said malleable, because that's how a lot of these generals get is, you know, they'll bend and twist and do whatever they need to.
And I think they lose any conviction that they had about what's right and wrong.
And I thought of the perfect antithesis of a political general would be General Honoré, you know, a guy like him who isn't bendable.
And then he becomes kind of almost like a tedious.
Right.
It's an excellent point.
Honoré is the one guy that straightened it up down in New Orleans when he finally went down there.
He came up with the phrase you're stuck on stupid when the drive-by media kept repeating questions to him.
You know, it's interesting.
The left thinks that military people, flag officers, everybody, a bunch of warmongers.
They can't wait.
They can't wait to go to war and line up all those weapons, start slaughtering innocent people.
They're dangerous.
They've made movies about this.
Dr. Strangelove, you know, the left thinks this.
The fact of the matter is, they don't.
It's the last thing they want to do.
And in a political environment, one of the overriding reasons is what if we lose?
Nobody looks good if we lose.
And the lesson of Vietnam is still fresh in a lot of people's minds.
There is a reluctance, and that probably may be a part of all this too, as well.
Denise, I'm glad you called.
We've got to take a brief time out, but we'll be right back.
I did see the Sopratos last night.
Anyway, folks, we're out of time for this busy broadcast hour, but we've got one more right behind it.