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April 17, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:45
April 17, 2006, Monday, Hour #3
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Time Text
Look at this.
This is breaking news from the ABCNews.com website.
I have it right here, my formerly nicotine stained fingers.
Former Illinois Governor George Ryan, a strong death penalty critic, was found guilty of fraud, racketeering, and tax evasion.
All right, fine and daddy.
What the hell does he think about the death penalty having any to do with this?
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Former Illinois Governor George Ryan, a strong death penalty critic.
What, is that supposed to get him less of a sentence or something?
Yeah, he did that moratorium on the death penalty.
I know what's it got to do with the fact he was found guilty of fraud, racketeering, and tax evasion.
Well, there might be a clue in the next story.
Unbelievable.
A witness called by defense attorneys trying to spare the life of Zacharias Masawi said today that he came from a broken home where his mother was repeatedly beaten and has a history of mental illness in his family.
Jan Vogelsang, a clinical social worker, said Masawi was in and out of orphanages the first six years of his life as a teenager.
She said he was rejected as a dirty Arab by the family of his longtime girlfriend with whom he lived and won dance contests.
Vogelsang said at the outset of her testimony she didn't intend to make excuses for Masawi's actions as a terrorist, but wanted to explain how he had reached that point.
All right, so, you know, you hear things like this.
it's going to arouse sympathy in people and it may oh that's what we knew he just couldn't be a bad boy There have to be reasons for it.
And now we know he was called a dirty Arab by the family of his girlfriend.
His mother was repeatedly beaten.
His father beat him and his mother, and he's a history of mental illness in his family.
He can't help it.
It's not his fault.
You know, this is the difference between liberals and conservatives.
Liberals will find evil and try to explain it and understand it and blame conservatives for it.
And conservatives say evil, you die.
And we try to rid the world of evil.
Liberals say they're trying to figure it out.
So maybe they can get closer to it.
Who knows?
But that's probably why the media throwing in this bit that George Ryan is a strong death penalty critic.
Hey, he's not all bad.
Let's try to be compassionate and understanding.
All right.
I'm sure that you have seen the story about Lee Raymond, the retiring Exxon chief.
Soaring gas prices are squeezing most Americans at the pump, but at least one man isn't complaining.
Exxon's giving Lee Raymond one of the most generous retirement packages in history, nearly $400 million, including pension, stock options, and other perks, such as a $1 million consulting deal, two years of home security, personal security, car and driver, and use of a corporate jet for professional purposes.
But how can he have any if he's retiring?
Last November, when he was still chairman of Exxon, Raymond told Congress gas prices were high because of global supply and demand.
We're all in this together everywhere in the world, he said.
Raymond, however, was confronted with caustic complaints about his compensation.
Barbara Boxer said, in 2004, Mr. Raymond, your bonus was over $3.6 million.
This is the way they always work.
Always go after corporate pay when prices in a business go up and they claim that the executives are rotten to the core.
And if they just take a little less compensation, that prices could be cut, which is patently absurd.
You know, you can say what you want about the retirement package for this one guy.
But what about what's happened to General Motors and the retirement package for tens of thousands of people?
General Motors is going broke paying people who don't produce anything.
They're not working.
They've been laid off.
They still get paid.
They get full compensation.
They get medical benefits.
They get their pensions.
And they're not working.
And if you add all that up, it will dwarf what they're paying this one guy at Exxon.
But nobody's complaining about it because individually, these workers are getting $130,000, $140,000 for not working, folks.
But nobody complains because, according to socialists and liberals, it is the duty of the corporation to pay.
It is not the requirement of the worker to work.
A la France, the worker doesn't really have to work, but the corporation must pay.
So here is a retirement package for one guy that is dwarfed by the problems that General Motors gave itself.
Boxer's a million.
She's a multiple millionaire.
Her husband is.
She is.
Same thing with Pelosi.
They're all swimming in money out there.
California delegation.
Oh, yeah, this guy's paid $3.6 whatever million dollars in salary, and this is horrible.
The little blue pill is leaving General Motors with a very large bill.
The world's largest automaker, which lost $10.6 billion last year, Exxon made big bucks.
Exxon made big.
I guess we're supposed to hope Exxon loses money, right?
Some of you probably think corporations should not make any money, that executives ought to be paid a reasonable amount of money, and the price ought to be so that it's cheaper for as many consumers as possible, but that at the end of the day, the corporation doesn't make any money.
Is that the way it's supposed to operate?
You would think of the way the drive-by media reports this story is that it is.
Exxon made tremendous amounts.
Yeah, but they did it on the backs of the American driver.
They did it on the backs of the American motorists by gouging.
We'll deal with that in just a second.
The world's largest automaker, GM, lost $10.6 billion last year, shelling out $17 million annually for impotence drugs like Viagra and Cialis, according to the GM spokesbabe, Sharon Baldwin.
While the so-called lifestyle drugs make up a small fraction of GM's overall health care costs, now hovering at $5.6 billion every year, or about $1,500 of every vehicle it builds, company execs often use the example to illustrate how out of control healthcare costs have become in America.
That's not even the story.
I need to find this.
I had it in a stack a week or two ago, and I never got to it.
No, it was a George Will column from last Sunday, I think, that I read it in the New York Post.
I was stunned at the amount of money General Motors is paying the large number of people who have been laid off and fired who don't work at full salary.
They have to show up, but they play bingo.
They play Monopoly.
They have rec rooms.
They're not working.
They show up, but they're not producing anything.
They're not contributing to the productivity of the company at all.
And that's part of a union deal that GM agreed to to avoid a strike a long time ago.
Now, you add all those people up, and hey, more power to you people if you can get it.
Don't misunderstand, but it's a stupid mistake in General Motors' part.
How can you pay people who aren't producing?
But you can sit there and you can get mad at whatever Lee Raymond's getting, but man, oh man, what General Motors is doing and the costs that it's incurring dwarf that.
But there are other examples, too.
I notice that liberals don't get upset over people like Ted Kennedy inheriting a huge fortune.
Or I don't see liberals getting all upset that John Kerry has married into one or two fortunes and tried to marry into a third.
Frankly, I mean, I don't care how anyone legally gets their money, but I don't care that moronic Hollywood actors make $20 million for a single film.
It doesn't bother me at all.
I don't care that Kerry twice married into enormous wealth.
You know, I mean, if you look at Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, and Lee Raymond, if forced to choose, I'd have to say that only Lee Raymond received his money the old-fashioned way.
He earned it.
He worked for it.
And yet, he's the guy that we're going to sit here and condemn.
Everybody's going to get upset.
This is unreal, guys.
It's too, it's just, it's out of proportion, especially at a time when the average consumer is being gouged.
Yeah, here's that George Wilcox.
Let me take a break.
I'll study this.
I found a paragraph right off the bat.
Under contracts negotiated beginning in 1984 with the UAW, there are about 14,700 laid-off workers in the jobs bank at General Motors.
About 7,500 of them are from GM.
They get paid most of their wages and benefits between $100,000 and $130,000 a year for an annual cost to General Motors of $750 million to $900 million.
The number of them grows every year.
The former workers, expected to be $17,000 by next year, are required to do nothing that adds value to the auto company.
Some of them attend classes given by GM.
Wall Street Journal reports that one worker took a class in which he learned how to play trivial pursuit.
Okay, so here's General Motors paying 14,700 people between $100,000 and $130,000 a year for doing nothing.
And that totals between, oh, what, $700 and $900 million, $750 million and $900 million a year.
GM is paying twice annually to support these 14,700 laid-off auto workers, is what the retiring exec from Exxon got.
But he worked and he earned it.
Ted Kennedy hadn't earned it.
Darn me say Barbara Boxer hasn't earned it.
I mean, this is just absurd.
Anyway, come back with this business on gas prices and gouging and so forth, and it may surprise you.
We'll be back.
Stay with us.
All right, I found this blog out there, ladies and gentlemen, called blogcritics.org.
Blogcritics.org.org describes themselves as a sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, technology, and politics.
Now, the blogger in this instance goes by the name of Bird of Paradise.
I don't know who it is, but the numbers seem accurate.
Let me share what this blogger discovered.
His headline, by the way, a thought on gasoline prices.
Rats, maybe they sort of make sense.
Instead of listening to talking heads or talk show callers to learn about gasoline prices, I decided to just sit down for 10 minutes and do a little math.
You know, the kind of math we learned in elementary school.
In any case, I first checked out some facts on the internet.
All figures are rough estimates rounded off.
In 2004, the average cost of a barrel of crude oil was $37.
In 2004, the average cost of a gallon of gasoline to pump was $1.85.
The cost of crude oil as a percentage of that $1.85 was 47%.
This means that the crude oil cost came to 87 cents per gallon of gasoline when the average price was $1.85.
Now, can I just pause for a moment?
What does that tell you?
It tells you what we've always tried to tell you here, that if you really want to get the gougers, go after the states and the federal government and their taxes.
The blogger then compared those numbers with 2005.
In 2005, the average cost of a barrel of oil had gone from $37 to $65.
The 2005 average cost of a gallon of gasoline to pump had gone from $1.85 to $250 to $3.
The cost of crude oil as a percentage of the total, and this is where the math comes in, the cost of crude oil increased by $28.
It went from $37 to $28.
$28 is an increase of 76% over 2004.
This means that the cost of crude oil alone added 66 cents to the cost of a gallon of gasoline.
Therefore, this one factor alone would have raised the cost per gallon of gasoline to $2.55 without factoring in any resulting increase in taxes, parentheses, which had an average of 23% of the cost per gallon would have risen from 42 cents to 58 cents, an increase of 16 cents.
And this doesn't factor refining costs.
There was a hurricane, remember, and transportation costs.
Those delivery trucks had to buy diesel at higher prices, too.
My guess is that with all these factors weighed in, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in 2005 ought to have been somewhere around $2.75 or so.
As it turns out, that's just about what it was.
Now, the cost of crude did fluctuate above and below that $65 per barrel figure, even as the selling price of a gallon of gasoline stayed relatively stable.
Over the course of the year, the oil companies probably made an above-average profit increase because of those fluctuations, but keep in mind, they had to increase prices ahead of costs because they didn't know just how high the cost per barrel of crude could go.
In short, they had to plan on the worst case scenario or else they could have run out of cash to purchase the oil.
So I wanted to throw this in because it's an interesting analysis of the comparative prices of 04 to 05, and nobody was out there complaining about gouging in 04.
In 05, everybody was complaining about gouging, but the price made total sense when compared to similar figures a year earlier.
Marty and Corpus Christi, Texas, great to have you on the program.
Nice to have you with us, sir.
Yeah, Rush.
Hey, I saw that headline yesterday, so I got curious.
I got on the web, did a little research, and what I found out is that Americans burn 360 million gallons of gasoline a day.
So if we take this guy's retirement away from him, the $400 million he's getting, take his whole retirement, that means that, and give it back to the American people.
That means that tomorrow, everybody who buys gas will save $1 per gallon, just tomorrow.
Just tomorrow.
It'll go right back to the original price.
Right.
It's asinine to think that corporate pay is, they try to position it as a moral question, but it falls apart when you get to the economics of it, as you just demonstrated.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the moral issue of $400 million to one guy, I guess there may be a point there to some degree, but the concept that that guy's pay is affecting the price of our gas that we buy is just asinine.
It is, no question about it.
Look, if the compensation board companies want to do it, if they want to incur the public relations hit that they're going to get by doing it until we lose the concept of the free market, then fine and dandy is their decision to do it.
But I just look at, you know, Marty here is exactly right.
Giving that guy zero is not going to save anybody any money on gasoline.
Paying him nothing is not going to, and you can find examples of other people who've inherited that much or more.
You can find examples where companies are paying twice, three times that to workers that no longer work.
And if you're worried about the corporation spending all that money, I mean, look, you go out and buy a General Motors car.
Let's say you're upset about the price.
Well, you got to factor in all these people they're paying that don't produce anything.
Why doesn't that make you as mad as what one guy gets?
Corporation to corporation, right?
They're still evil, no matter what they do.
By the way, a little immigration note here.
This is from Bob Novak Saturday piece.
Saturday.
Yeah.
Immigration politics.
New national polling data shows to the surprise of many politicians that the immigration issue is one of the very rare areas where President Bush is gaining rather than losing strength.
The conventional wisdom has been that Bush's guest worker proposal runs sharply against mainstream Republican opinion and contributes to the president's loss of party support.
However, current polls show Republican opinion on the issue is split, as are the Democrats, with a national majority actually backing Bush while he continues to drop in nearly every other category.
But this next little paragraph or sentence is the key.
And I think this is going to outrage some of you because a lot of you expected Republicans and Democrats, but Republicans in particular, to go home during the Easter recess.
They're home now during the Easter.
And you expected them to just get an earful from angry constituents about illegal immigration, right?
Well, some Republican members of Congress have reported back from Easter recess to say that their constituents are less outraged by leaky borders than the possible loss of immigrant workers, some from their own households.
That's all it says.
That's all it says.
Doesn't add it.
This is Bob Novak saying this.
We don't know how many Republican members.
He just says some.
But he's clearly laying the foundation here.
The Republicans are going home.
And they're surprised because they're hearing a lot of our constituents say, hey, you better be careful about getting rid of these people because I use them.
And notice it's not business people using them in the farms and so forth.
This is Republicans who have them in their households, who are afraid that they are going to lose them.
This is interesting.
I don't know how.
Mr. Snurdley, it may not be bull.
It may be three congressmen.
We don't know how many.
It would be bull if you think that it's over half of them with this, but just the fact that this little blurb makes the news is it what made the news is not that everybody is finding outrage out there, that some Republicans are saying, hey, hey, hey, go easy on this.
We don't want to lose our staff.
And welcome back, folks.
Rush Limboy, your host for life here on the EIB network, not retiring until every American agrees with me.
And we are thrilled and honored to have with us the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for a few minutes.
Mr. Secretary, thank you for making some time available for us.
Well, thank you.
I'm delighted to do it.
Well, let me ask you, I got to remind you of something.
You probably won't remember the phone call to this program.
It was the first time I spoke to you, and it was early on in the first term of President Bush.
And at the time, I forget the subject.
It might have been the artillery weapon that you had voted down.
I remember it well, the Crusader.
But that wasn't at the time, it was shortly after a couple of very successful operations militarily.
You were being hailed as a sex symbol in Washington.
And I asked you about that.
You were clearly embarrassed.
You laughed and so forth.
Today, it's a far different circumstance.
It's a great illustration of just how things work inside the Beltway.
What does it feel like to you to go through these ups and downs and to have practically the entire media jump on the case of these six generals demanding your ouster?
Well, you know, this too will pass.
I think about it, and I must say there's always two sides to these things, and the sharper the criticism comes, sometimes the sharper the defense comes from people who don't agree with the critics.
And I've been very pleased to see General Dick Myers and General Tommy Franks and General Mike DeLong and so many others, Admiral Vern Clark, step up and people who I've worked very closely with, and they've been terrific.
And so I'm here at the Pentagon doing my job, working on transformation and seeing that we manage the force in a successful way and working on things involving Iraq, for example.
They just transferred over some important real estate to the Iraqi security forces today, had a ceremony, which is a sign of progress there.
Now, what we need to see is a new government formed in Iraq.
Let me ask you, before I get to that, you mentioned General Myers and Mike DeLong and others that have come to your defense.
They seem to be contradicting point by point the criticism.
The criticism of you is that you're autocratic, that you don't listen, that you're inflexible, that you're stubborn.
And the details that they're all providing countered that specifically.
So why are these guys doing it now?
What do you think?
Well, I just don't know.
I can't climb into other people's minds.
I was amused that Admiral Vern Clark said, yes, he is tough, and these are tough times.
And we need people in government who are tough-minded and feel a sense of urgency.
So I suppose beauty's in the eye of the beholder.
Iraq, your assessment, obviously, with the news that you just gave us is that it's much better there than it's being reported.
And I assume that you're optimistic about the final outcome.
You say we just got to get them to create a government.
Some people think that it might be better just launch an all-out assault on the enemy and defeat the enemy and then set up the government so you wouldn't have so many distractions and attempts to oppose that effort.
Well, of course, it'd be wonderful if there were an enemy that was in reasonable clusters of people that you could go after them.
The problem is that you don't have a big army, navy, or air force that you can go after.
These are terrorists.
These are insurgents.
These are people that hide in the shadows.
These are people that kill innocent men, women, and children.
They're not people that confront anybody in a formal way that you could go after.
So what you have to do is create a presence, have a lot of tip lines so that calls can come in and people who are supportive of the country and the progress that's being made can phone into the Iraqi security forces or our forces and tell them where the bad people are.
And then you just have to go root them out one or two at a time.
How would you describe the process and the progress there?
Well, the progress has been good.
I mean, we were now up to a quarter of a million Iraqi security forces, and they're, as I say, taking over more and more bases and real estate all the time.
And we're able to transfer responsibility to them.
The biggest problem we've got right now is that the people that were the people who voted in the last election in December 15th are now waiting for the results of that election to be manifested in a new government.
And the politicians over there are struggling with that.
They're trying to figure out who should be prime minister and who should be the president and who should be the various ministers.
And it's taken from December 15th until today.
And we're hopeful that in the next period of days, they'll pull it together.
More and more, the leadership in the Kurdish community, the Sunni community, and now in the Shia community are saying, let's get it done.
I think it's important that the security forces that we've trained and equip have a government that they can report to and look up to and receive guidance and leadership from.
So is there an organized opposition within those three groups to prevent this government from being formed that has a chance of succeeding?
Well, I mean, there's no question.
You're quite right.
The insurgents do not want the government formed.
And there are elements in the country that are actively trying to prevent that.
Just as they tried to prevent the election last year ago, January, they tried to prevent the referendum on the Constitution.
And they tried to prevent the December elections.
And now they're trying to prevent the government from being formed.
But they failed the first three times, and they're going to fail this time.
We're going to get it done.
Let me ask you this question.
You've been in the private sector, and you've had plenty of public service in various positions in our government, and you've devoted your life largely to public service, and you're very much aware of our representative Republican Democratic process here.
We have people in the country who have been attempting ever since shortly after the war with Iraq commenced that are trying to gin up as much anti-war support amongst the American population as possible.
Yet here you are as a member of this administration with a stated goal where Iraq and the war on terror is concerned.
You have to be aware of the anti-war opinion, those in the country who have it, and you're aware of the people that are trying to foam in it and make it larger.
How do you, as a public servant, square the attitude of the anti-war people, if you think it's a large group of people, with what you are stated, your stated goals and what the present stated goals are?
How do you put those two together and end up formulating a policy and sticking to it?
Yeah, that's a very important question.
And I guess only someone who's rooted in the history of our country, I think, could accept the kinds of comments that are being made.
And if we recognize that the same kinds of criticisms occurred in the Revolutionary War and World War I and World War II and Korean War and Vietnam War, it's not new.
There have always been people who've opposed wars.
Wars are terrible things.
On the other hand, if every time there were critics and opponents to war, we wouldn't have won the Revolutionary War, and we wouldn't have been involved in World War I or II.
Or if we had, we would have failed.
And our country would be a totally different place if it existed at all, if every time there were some critics that we tossed in the towel.
I think we just have to accept it, that people have a right to say what they want to say, and to have an acceptance of that and recognize that the terrorists, Zarqawi and Bin Laden and Zawahiri, those people have media committees.
They are actively out there trying to manipulate the press in the United States.
They are very good at it.
They're much better at managing those kinds of things than we are.
And we have to recognize that we're not going to lose any battles out in the global war on terror out in Iraq or Afghanistan.
The center of gravity of that war is right here.
And in the capital of the United States of America and other Western capitals in London, it's a test of wills.
And what's at stake for our country is our way of life.
They want to strike at the very essence of what we are.
We're free people.
And our task in government, by golly, is to help protect the American people from people who killed 3,000 people here on September 11th and killed people in London and Madrid and Bali and country after country around the world who have no problems beheading people and murdering innocent men, women, and children.
Well, it's got to be tough, I would imagine, because I'm aware of it, and I try to share with my audience as often as possible that people like you and the President know far more than the public knows about any number of events simply because it's not possible for the information that you learn to be shared, nor should most of it.
And yet, that would have to force you at some point to say, you know, yeah, we do have an anti-war crowd, and they're loud and they're being affected by our enemy, but the American people, some of them just don't know what we know, and you have to stick with what you think is right.
And that's where the whole democratic process, I would think, becomes challenging for you because you have to make a judgment.
We do what's right, or we listen to the people.
Yeah, and of course, if you started running around chasing public opinion polls or a handful of people who are critics for this or critics on that, you wouldn't get anywhere in this world.
We need people like President Bush who are serious people, who spend a great deal of time thinking through direction for our country, set us on that course, and then have the courage and the perseverance to stay on that course.
Before you go, and I know time is short and I've got a break too, but I know that you're very supportive of a website that DOD has put up, AmericasupportsYou.military, .mil.
What does that website help people do?
Well, you know, we've got such wonderful young men and women, the troops out there serving our country.
They're all volunteers.
And so what we did is we put together a website whereby anyone who wants to can get on it and find out what other people are doing to be supportive of the troops and their families.
And you can learn what school groups are doing, what corporations are doing, families, non-governmental organizations.
There are just hundreds of people who are out there doing things that are supportive of the troops and letting them know that we appreciate their service, their noble service for our country.
Okay, terrific.
Well, we'll continue to plug that here.
Let me admend it.
Let me ask you one final question.
Somebody on my staff is curious to know what your opinion is of embedding reporters with the military.
Has that worked?
Has that worked as you had hoped?
Well, it has.
It worked during the Iraq conflict, and a lot of people who are reporters and journalists were able to work with our troops and see precisely how terrific they are, the wonderful job they do, the kinds of people they are, how professional they are, and the rest of their lives, they're going to have an impression of the American military that will be good for journalism, in my view.
Furthermore, they were able, because they were embedded, to see and then give the world and the people of the United States a slice of what was actually happening, real reality.
And it was a good thing.
More recently, very few people have been being embedded.
We're still offering that opportunity.
But there have been far fewer journalists who have stepped up to become embedded.
Why do you think that is?
Well, it's a funny thing.
I asked one reporter about that, and there was kind of the impression left that, well, if you got embedded, then you were really part of the problem instead of part of the solution, and you were almost gone over to the other side argument.
I think that's an inexcusable thought, and I don't know if that's a problem.
That's outrageous.
It is.
That's outrageous.
I'll say it.
I can't believe it.
Well, look, I thank you so much for your time.
I don't want to cause your schedule to get backlogged anymore.
We always appreciate whatever time you have for us.
And I had so many, I met you a couple weeks ago in New York, and I forgot to tell you something.
I had so many people, as I mentioned, I was going to be at the Marine dinner, and I had so many people in my audience tell me to be sure to tell you how much they love and respect what you're doing.
So let me do it now.
Well, that means a lot to me, and I thank you so much, and I thank you for what you do.
Well, thank you, sir.
I appreciate that.
Secretary, embarrasses me when I get thanked.
Secretary Rumsfeld at the Pentagon Department of Defense.
And we will, by necessity, have to take a brief timeout, my friends.
We'll be back and continue right after this.
I can't believe the last answer we got from Secretary Rumsfeld on fewer journalists wanting to embed with active units in Iraq.
He said a journalist told him that, well, you know, it would appear as though we're working for the other side.
We're going over.
The other side's us.
The way I interpreted that is that we can't.
See, the action line is it isn't working.
And to embed troops and embed reporters with the troops, you'd have to show success stories.
You have to run the risk that you'd see a success story out.
We can't have that because we're going over to the other side.
By the way, ladies and gentlemen, I just spoke with Coco during the break, webmaster at rushlimbaugh.com.
We're going to post the Rumsfeld transcript ASAP so that the media can get right to the misquoting, distorting, and taking out of context of the interview.
As an added convenience, not just to our subscribers, but to the media who want to misquote him, distort it, and take him out of context.
It'll be up there as soon as we can get it up.
Becky in Frankfort, Kentucky.
Welcome to the program.
Hey, Rush.
Hey.
I just want to hopefully you can remind people of the bravery of Secretary Rumsfeld during 9-11 when the Pentagon was hit, and he was saving people's lives by helping evacuate injured people instead of running.
Speaks great character of the Secretary, and I'm behind him 100%.
I appreciate your reminding everybody that.
I think he's a, well, obviously all he's a unique individual, but he has this knack of, and I admire this in people.
He has this knack of irritating people.
I've found that more people you irritate of a certain stripe, it's a sign of effectiveness.
And again, I hearken back, and you talk about the strategic planning of this group, this cabal, including the drive-by media that wants Secretary Rumsfeld to resign or to force President Bush to fire him.
They have guaranteed that neither of those things will happen with this onslaught.
And the latest today, in case you haven't been with us the whole program, the French news agency is running a story suggesting that the chief of staff of the army disagreed with Rumsfeld, and he's the first Asian-American Chief of Staff of the Army, Eric Shinsecki.
And Shinsecki resigned or retired in a dispute with Rumsfeld.
But the headline and a couple of passages in the story trying to make it racial, that Rumsfeld was so insensitive.
They had to get rid of the first Asian-American Chief of Staff of the Army.
And it's just, yeah, the Drive-By Media is upset.
They have failed here to get Rumsfeld's scalp, and so they're ratcheting it up in an effort to make it happen.
And it's sort of typical of the left.
When extreme tactics don't work, rather than retreat and come up with a new plan, they simply double the extreme tactics.
And it doesn't work.
And it doesn't persuade people.
It's like they've tried to persuade people on any number of things, policy-wise.
Bush of the National Guard is one.
The Wellstone Memorial was a classic example of that.
And after that, the Libs thought, oh, you know, we didn't get our message out when they lost the 2002 midterms.
Now you have.
You've gotten it out loud and clear for 50 years.
And people now get it more than ever.
Get this, Honda.
You won't see this in the drive-by media.
Honda Motor Company might cut production of the Honda Accord hybrid because sales have been so slow.
Hybrid sales appear to be slowing down, something that was been warned about by the Nissan Motor Company chief executive as consumers decide whether hybrids are worth their additional cost.
Why, I thought everybody was buying hybrids.
It turns out that Honda may stop making them or will make much, much less of them.
Quick timeout.
We'll continue in a sec.
You know, Snerdley is right.
He observes this attack on Rumsfeld parallels the attack on John Bolton in several eerie and similar ways.
Think about that.
We'll talk about it tomorrow and whatever else comes up.
Look forward to seeing you then.
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