Rush Limbaugh Program - April 18, 2006, Tuesday, Hour #1

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April 18, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program

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April 18, 2006, Tuesday, Hour #1

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	Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 Podcast.
	Ha.
	How are you, folks?
	You're the only place you need to be today, the Rush Limbaugh program, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network Fun, frolic and frivolity for all, as well as the serious discussion of issues.
	This a program exclusively tailored to rich Republicans, right-minded conservatives, and those who aspire to either or both.
	Uh Liberal Democrats, Socialists, and Communists listen at their own risk.
	Telephone number if you want to be on the program today, 800-282-2882, the email address rush at EIB net.com, sticking with the Sack Rumsfeld story.
	Because I've been doing a lot of research on this.
	I've been doing a lot of thinking about this.
	And it appears that while these generals, the six generals uh are out there saying, Hey, hey, this is all coincidental.
	We're not coordinated in any way.
	I am beginning to wonder, not about them, but who is behind them?
	Tony blankly today, seven days in April, uh, this is his syndicated column.
	He's the editorial page editor of the Washington Times.
	Consider two hypothetical situations.
	In the first, a U.S. Army general officer in a theater of war decides by himself he strongly disagrees with the orders of the Secretary of Defense.
	He resigns his commission.
	He returns to private life and speaks out vigorously against both the policy and the Secretary of Defense.
	In example two, the top 100 generals in the Army military chain of command secretly agree amongst themselves to retire and speak out, each one day after the other.
	In example one above, unambiguously, the general has behaved lawfully.
	In example two, an arguable case could be made that something in the nature of a mutinous sedition has occurred in violation of Article 94 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice Procedure.
	When does an expanded version of the simple honesty and legality of the first example above cross over into grounds for a court martial?
	More specifically, can a series of lawful resignations turn into a mutiny?
	And if they are agreed upon in advance, have the agreeing generals formed a felonious conspiracy to make a mutiny.
	Now this may sound far-fetched, but in Sunday's Washington Post, the very well-connected former Clinton ambassador to the United Nations, Richard Holbrook, published an article entitled Behind the Military Revolt.
	In this article, Holbrook predicts that there will be increasing numbers of retired generals speaking out against Secretary Rumsfeld.
	Oh, really?
	So we have only seen the surface scratched as of now, eh?
	Then, shockingly, Holbrook writes the following words.
	Quote, if more angry generals emerge, and they will, if some of them are on active duty, as seems probable, then this storm will continue until finally it consumes not only Donald Rumsfeld.
	Mr. Holbrook is at the very least well informed.
	If he is not himself part of this military cabal, intended to consume Donald Rumsfeld, Mr. Holbrook sets the historic tone of his article in his first sentence when he says that this event is the most dangerous and serious public confrontation between the military and administration since Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur.
	He takes that model one step further later in the article when he compares the current campaign against Rumsfeld with the MacArthur event and with General George McClellan versus Lincoln, General John Singlaub against Carter.
	He writes, but such challenges are rare enough to be memorable.
	None of these solo rebellions metastasized into a group, a movement that can be fairly described as a revolt.
	A revolt of several American generals against the Secretary of Defense and by implication against the President?
	Admittedly, if each general first retires and speaks out, there would appear to be no violation of law.
	And blankly goes on to cite uh Article 94, Mutiny and Sedition, and uh and and reprints uh uh several Aspects of it.
	He says in conclusion, certainly generals and admirals are traditionally given more leeway to publicly assess war policies than is given to those in lower ranks.
	But with that broader, though limited discretion comes the responsibility not to be seen to in any way contradict the absolute rule of civilians over the military in our constitutional republic.
	The president has his authority granted to him by the people in the election of 2004.
	Where exactly do the generals in revolt think their authority comes from?
	Folks, this uh this this may be far more serious.
	It may be a much deeper web.
	There may there may be a huge web of deceit being spun here.
	Uh and and uh Holbrook uh Clintonite.
	Oh, he was going to be John Kerry's Secretary of State if Kerry had emerged victorious.
	Kerry served to Vietnam, by the way, and uh Holbrook would have been his Secretary of State.
	And now Holbrook's out there writing in the Washington Post as though he has knowledge of this.
	He writes in such a way that blankly even muses and asks whether Holbrook is himself part of this military cabal intended to consume Donald Rumsfeld and by definition consume even more than Rumsfeld.
	If it consumes Rumsfeld, it consumes Bush.
	Uh it'll be interesting to see what does happen in the future.
	I nothing would surprise me when it comes to the left.
	Nothing at all, ladies and gentlemen.
	I tell you, this is a this is a very, very precarious situation.
	Because I'm going to tell you the bottom line truth.
	A Democrat president can do whatever he wants here.
	You know, you might say, and I've I've had I've had some um events and people say to me that uh, you know what, Rush, I'm really worried.
	Let's say the next administration is a Democrat president.
	You know what the Democrats have done?
	What if the next Democrat president just wants to surrender the war on terror on the basis that there is no war?
	If we just quit, since Bush is the one that started it.
	You realize that every terrorist attack on the U.S. in the future, the left can now blame Bush.
	They've set the table for it.
	There was no war before Bush, and he started it, angering all these Islamists.
	They'll seek to inoculate any Democrat president from criticism, allowing him not to respond to any future attacks if he doesn't want to, since doing that started the war in the first place.
	Now, here's the bottom line truth, though.
	Let's say a next Democrat president does not want to serve.
	Let's say this is we get attacked again, a Democrat president says you can't do that, and launches a major salvo.
	The fact is, a Democrat president can do whatever he wants here, and he will be backed by the Democrats and a drive-by media and most Republicans in Congress.
	A Democrat could bomb Iraq off the face of the earth.
	John McCain would support it, and with all those Republicans in Congress and the drive-by media who now attack Bush.
	Truman dropped atomic bombs.
	That was okay.
	Most of us agree with the decision.
	If a Republican president had done that, you can only imagine the response of what the historians would be saying today.
	But let Clinton go bomb citizens and infrastructure in Serbia, he's a liberator.
	He doesn't have to go to the U.N. Nobody ever questioned his useless defense secretaries.
	Most people don't even know who they were.
	He can agree to let the Chinese take over the ports and the Panama Canal, no problem.
	He can let Bin Laden go three times.
	No problem.
	He can arm the Red Chinese and North Koreans, no problem.
	He can sit on his hands while 800,000 Rwandans are slaughtered, and he's hailed as the first black president.
	No problem.
	He can do nothing about AIDS.
	No problem.
	John McCain has seen this and is learning from it.
	When McCain was a true right winger, they came after him as one of the keying five.
	But when he joined in trashing his fellow Republicans, he became the media's darling.
	And the Keating Five never happened.
	Now the reason I bring McCain into this is because there's a little story that we found from April 15th in something called the Scottsdale Tribune.
	McCain had a press conference in his Phoenix offices last week.
	Senator McCain joins the ranks of retired generals who have said they have no confidence in Defense Secretary Rumsfeld.
	Or more precisely, McCain says the generals are falling in line with his long-standing assessment.
	McCain says, I was asked a long time ago, I think a year, a year and a half or two years ago, if I had confidence in rum filling, I was asked that directly.
	I said, no.
	No.
	But the president has the right and earned the right as the president of the U.S. to appoint his team, and he has confidence in Secretary Rumsfeld.
	I'll continue to work with him, but I have no confidence in him.
	So McCain joined the fray against Rumsfeld, actually claiming he's the leader of it.
	Then we learn what we've learned today about Richard Holbrook and so forth and the possibility that well, the pr his prediction, the likelihood he knows what's going on here, that there are going to be even more generals down the line that either retire and uh come out and join this fray, or already retired generals have been recruited and that there is a a process by which they will uh step forward one day at a time, two days.
	Who knows how it's gonna happen, but it appears that is the case.
	And over what?
	Over what, folks?
	Ask yourself that salient question.
	Over what is all of this about?
	Do you even know?
	Do you know what their grievance against Rumsfeld is?
	Can you name it?
	Tell me what it is.
	He's stubborn, yeah, okay, but it's far but but do you think the civilian population gets this at all?
	What it what are they what he's stubborn, he doesn't listen to people, he's this or that.
	That's not that there's there's far more to it than that.
	This is about getting rid of this administration.
	This is about getting rid of George W. Bush.
	This is about getting rid of the war on terror.
	This is about the Democrats and the Liberals in this country.
	It's just the latest Bush National Guard story is what this is, folks.
	It's just the latest attempt to take out this administration.
	This is an end run in case they don't win the House and cannot do their impeachment procedure.
	They're kind of to get it done in this fashion.
	There's a there's a piece here at one of our favorite blogs, the American thinker.com, Rumsfeld's enemies and the white flag of surrender.
	And there's a story that in the early days of the 73 Jam Kipper War, Moshe Diane, the Israeli general with the eye patch, who is regarded as the father of the IDF, Israeli defense forces, and who was then defense minister, offered his resignation to Golamayir because he was stricken with a sense of guilt at having to put the country in such a calamity.
	The story goes that she refused the resignation.
	Later said to her aide Moshe Diane, resign and be running up the white flag.
	No.
	The current campaign of criticism of Secretary Rumsfeld by senior retired officers has to be seen in the same light.
	They obviously feel strongly, although it's unclear to a civilian exactly what it is they feel strongly about.
	But the bottom line of criticism is that Rumsfeld has to go.
	In last week's Time magazine, retired Lieutenant General Greg Newbold wrote an article titled Why Iraq was a mistake.
	What is General Newbold think was a mistake?
	Well, so far as I can tell, six things.
	One, Iraq had nothing to do with Al Qaeda.
	That's not true.
	They did.
	It's becoming more and more obvious each and every day as people continue to pour through these documents that have been found.
	Al Qaeda and Saddam were linked.
	That's a bunch of BS.
	And this is a general who refuses to accept.
	Number two, the failure of pre-war intelligence.
	Iraq was a mistake, failure pre-war intelligence.
	The dispersalist number three of the Iraqi military, so it could not help quell civil disorder.
	Uh reflecting a touching faith in a force debased by obedience to Saddam for decades, and in any case a Sunni force, not only in retrospect in hindsight, these guys want us to believe that we could have turned this this Iraqi military into um into American patriots inside of two weeks.
	The misidentification of the insurgency in its early days is reason number four.
	Number five, the alienation of allies who could have helped in a more robust way to rebuild Iraq.
	Makes one wonder what planet the general has been living on.
	Number six, and the failure of other U.S. agencies to make commitments commensurate with that of the Department of Defense, which is a bit surprising as a criticism of Rumsfeld, who has no influence over other agencies.
	So with these criticism, what to do?
	Well, General Newbold thinks we need fresh ideas and fresh faces.
	Well, could you be a little bit more specific?
	What are you talking about?
	This is written by Greg Richards, and he says, is anybody else as shocked as I am at the inability of the opposition to Rumsfeld to make any sort of coherent case in public?
	If this is all they've got, this is nothing other than a political attack and should be treated as such, and that's exactly what this is.
	Back in just a second.
	America's anchor man, anchored in the EIB, Attila the Hun Chair, prestigious endowment here at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
	Phone number 800 282-2882.
	Now back to Senator McCain and this Scottsdale Tribune or Phoenix, whatever the newspaper is.
	I can't tell the Tribune, East Valley, Scottsdale.
	I'm not trying to disrespect it.
	I just don't know what it is.
	It's the Tribune.
	I couldn't, I don't know where it is.
	Does it?
	It's out there somewhere.
	Headline, busy McCain express You people that have newspapers on the web, why don't you put information where people know what they're reading?
	My gosh, you gotta understand a communicate.
	You're in the news business.
	Anyway, it's the I think it's the Scottsdale Tribune.
	At any rate, Busy McCain expresses views on Rumsfeld, immigration, Iraq war.
	And as I already told you, McCain, press conference in his orifice last Friday in Phoenix, essentially said, Hey, I've been saying this about Rumsfeld for a long time.
	These generals are finally coming around to me.
	And he has.
	He has said for countless times he has no confidence in Rumsfeld.
	There's a reason he's doing this, and I will explain it to you in due course.
	Elsewhere in this story, it's fascinating.
	Discussing Iraq.
	The Senator saw signs of slow but steady progress.
	Yet we have no confidence in Rumsfeld.
	Now follow this, folks.
	Despite seeing these slow signs of steady progress, he said he's hopeful that within six months Iraq will move toward a functioning government, an improved economy, and a reduction of U.S. casualties.
	One sign of progress, Senator McCain said, is the increased training of the Iraqi military, which has allowed Iraqi personnel to assume more frontline operations than insurgents.
	That's why you see rising Iraqi casualties and a reduction in casualties to American troops.
	That's a sign of progress.
	It's sad, but it's still a sign of progress that Americans are suffering fewer casualties.
	Overall, though, the Iraq war has proven to be far worse than the Vietnam War.
	And here's why.
	When we left Vietnam, the Vietnamese didn't want to come after us.
	These peoples, Zarkawi, Bin Laden and others, they want to come after us.
	They're not interested in Iraq as much as they're interested in destroying us and everything we stand and believe in.
	There's a great deal at stake here.
	They want to come after us.
	They already have come after us.
	Now, let me tell you about this.
	McCain's digging an even deeper hole for himself with the base on this.
	The base doesn't does they understand this is a pure political attack on Rumsfeld and Bush, that it has nothing to do with the way the prosecution of the war is being handled.
	So active duty generals who are serving their country faithfully are not to be believed.
	People need to keep in mind that while McCain served in the military, he didn't actually command any kind of sizable force.
	So he brings no particular ex expertise to the table when it comes to command structure in the rest.
	He just wants you to think he has it.
	He spent five years undermining Rumsfeld, including putting long holds on his personnel selections.
	And I think this is evidence of McCain's temperament issues.
	Rummy's a strong personality, so McCain doesn't like the fact that Rummy doesn't bow down to his demands and run the war the way McCain would run it.
	McCain thinks he's president in waiting.
	He's acting like he's a foregone conclusion as the nominee and is the president.
	I mean, let's not forget John McCain is a guy who said that Hillary Clinton and John Kerry would make good presidents.
	When John Kerry asked him to be his VEP running mate, McCain waited a week, giving everybody the idea he was actually toying with it, perhaps going to accept it before he rejected it.
	His judgment on everything from political free speech to tax cuts makes him unreliable, but now he's out there impugning the integrity of active duty generals, and it's outrageous.
	And there are f there are many more thousands of them than there are these six or seven or however many more are going to be coming forward.
	Now, we talked a little bit about about Holebrook's piece and so forth.
	I don't think there's any question here, folks, that there is an effort underway now to turn the military against Rumsfeld by ex-Clinton types, State Department types, a Holbrook's, the uh the uh Powell's chief of staff over there, forget his name.
	Uh liberal politicians joined as usual by McCain.
	Chuck Hagel probably get in on this too.
	Lindsey Graham will pipe up at some point, usual GOP losers.
	For the liberals, it's just another assault on the war effort for people like McCain.
	It's an effort to provide cover for his pro war position.
	He can say, if only they had listened to me, this war would have gone better.
	This is all calculated.
	He agrees with the generals because he doesn't like Rumsfeld.
	He thinks he's got a better idea for how to prosecute the war.
	He can still go out there and be pro-war while ripping Rumsfeld and the and the current plan all the smithereens, and then at the end of the day, if they'd only listen to me, if they just listen to me, if they just listen to me.
	Holbrook is.
	He refers to Truman and Lincoln and their firing of generals.
	In this case, they're calling on the fiery the Secretary of Defense.
	Neither Lincoln nor Truman fired their secretaries of war.
	Anyway, I got a break coming up here, folks, but this really frusts me.
	All of this does.
	It's just the latest political hack attack.
	And it's uh uh I don't know how these generals were gotten to, and I don't care.
	Some of their beliefs may be genuine.
	I don't, it doesn't matter.
	All I know is the people probably behind this don't care about this war one way or the other.
	Hi, welcome back.
	Nice to have you here on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
	You know this all this this this Rumsfeld business, which make no mistake about it is uh is targeted at Bush.
	You get you get people like Richard Holbrook behind this and and uh Bill Clinton can't be far behind in the wings and John Kerry and the uh in the entire Democrat Party establishment.
	It makes you wonder.
	At least it makes me wonder if we could ever fight a World War II again.
	Uh I ask that because look at the relatively low casualties in this war.
	And I by the way, I I say that acknowledging that every single American soldier's life is precious.
	We lost 58,000 in Vietnam.
	The numbers in World War II and the uh related battles there, I it dwarf what happened here.
	Uh and these numbers are coming down in Iraq.
	Uh and yet, before we even hit a thousand battlefield deaths, the media was excitedly drive-by media counting up breathlessly just unable to wait till we got to the magic number of one thousand as they were attempting to rev up all this anti-war sentiment in the country.
	You look at how much progress we've made in a few years, yet all the talk about how this is a failure.
	The Soviets had a hundred thousand casualties after ten years in Afghanistan, and they had to leave.
	A hundred thousand casualties in ten years.
	We defeated the Taliban.
	We defeated the Afghanistan enemy in weeks.
	Now there's a democracy there.
	It's fledgling.
	Taliban insurgents remain, but it's a long way from where we were four or five years ago, and it's a long way from where they were.
	Saddam Hussein defeated in weeks.
	There have been several votes by the people.
	A constitution's been adopted.
	Now they're working on agreeing on a government after never having had the chance in Iraq before.
	None of these people have ever had the kind of chance and opportunity they have now.
	And all you hear is how slow this is.
	And how we have no plan.
	And now it's a failure.
	And how Rumsfeld has to go, this is absurd.
	Are we ever going to be allowed to win another war in this country unless there's some idiotic Democrat president who doesn't know how to fight one in office?
	We are trying to reverse 5,000 years of tyranny here in a few years' time.
	We're making great headway.
	How can anybody look at this and conclude that we lost?
	And I'll tell you something else.
	There's something else out there, folks, that we've spent a couple time on it uh some time on it the past couple of days.
	Nobody wants to acknowledge or deal with the uh fact on the anti-Rumsfeld side, nobody wants to deal with Iran.
	I'm folks, there are people who are trying to get the president's head and Rumsfeld's head who will lose this country if they get control of it.
	They are sending the message to Iran that we will not fight for our stated principles and beliefs.
	They are they are buying time for Iran to build up.
	The one thing that Iran has admitted it's frightened of is Bush.
	Because Bush has used force.
	They would love for somebody besides Bush to be president, some mealy-mouthed John Kerry whose answer to all of this is to go back and bomb Tora Bora again.
	Only this time do it smarter and do it wiser.
	Why don't they tell us Right now.
	All of these people who are saying Rumsfeld has to go, that Rice stinks, that Bush stinks, that John Bolton's a bad guy, why don't these people tell us right now how they are going to stop Iran from getting nukes?
	And let's be honest.
	Diplomacy won't work, and it hasn't worked.
	And neither will the United Nations.
	The idea that one-on-one negotiations will work is also nuts.
	All these people from Chris Dodd to Feinstein to whoever else saying we need to stop outsourcing diplomacy.
	Outsourcing diplomacy, which is exactly what they wanted us to do in Iraq.
	They demanded we go to the UN.
	We did for a year and a half.
	They demanded that the French and the Germans be involved.
	We tried.
	They wanted nothing to do with it.
	We had a problem, we dealt with it, we're in the process of dealing with dealing with it now, and the progress can be measured on the positive end of the scale, and yet everybody on the left wants to call this an abject failure.
	And now, after all of that, when it comes to Iran, Bush is outsourcing diplomacy.
	We got to go in there and we gotta talk to them ourselves, one-on-one talks, that's absolutely crazy.
	This is the same regime, essentially, is nothing more than a bunch of Khomeini followers and heirs.
	This is the same regime that Carter tried to appease time and time again when they kidnapped our diplomats.
	This is a regime that gives safe harbor to Al-Qaeda, arms the terrorists with IEDs to use against our troop.
	Where do you think those blown up cars originate?
	Those car bombs originate in Iran.
	The president found out about it.
	We've intercepted a couple of shipments of the things to Iraq, called them on it.
	They're openly stating they seek the annihilation of Israel.
	They're every bit the Nazis of the Third Reich.
	They're even more bellicose.
	They're even more pointed.
	They're announcing in public what they're going to do.
	They are daring us to do something about it.
	And every time they open their mouth, some brilliant diplomat, bureaucrat, pinhead elitist warns Bush, you better you better not respond to this.
	You better not reply.
	You better not use that.
	You better not cause trouble.
	If you respond to this, you're gonna really ruin our reputation in the world.
	I'll tell you, you know, negotiating directly with his people even after the European Union tried for years and failed?
	That's their answer.
	Richard Luger to some Republicans in on this, folks, it's not just Democrats, it's some pointy-headed elitist Republicans who think this is a brilliant idea.
	Meanwhile, we must not use force.
	No, no, no, no, we must not use force.
	So if we're not going to use force, if we're going to take force off the table, would somebody explain to me, an average ordinary guy who doesn't have an East Coast Ivy League pedigree.
	Would somebody explain to me what are we going to negotiate with if we take force off the table in dealing with Iran?
	What are we going to do?
	Huff and puff and threaten sanctions?
	Ooh, big time.
	The Chinese or Russians aren't going to go along with us on that, so what good are they going to do?
	They don't have a plan.
	You talk about Rumsfeld and his plan and all his bad war planning and the peace planning is right.
	What is these people's plan?
	These critics, what is their plan?
	They have no plan.
	I'll tell you why, folks, and this is what's scary.
	They think that Iran arming itself with nukes is inevitable.
	And that we must not and cannot stop them.
	We have to contain them.
	It's back to having something like a new cold war with an Islamist republic that has nukes.
	So we get to practice all the appeasement that the left loves, we get to practice all the containment, State Department gets a whole new life.
	New diplomats get to run around and talk and accomplish nothing.
	And that's because they find false comfort behind phony diplomatic efforts, international bureaucracies that are utterly useless.
	And while all this is going on, they're conceding to Iran the ability to arm itself with nukes.
	And there are a lot of Republicans, too.
	Like Richard Luger, who's the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
	He thinks this is a great idea.
	We need one-on-one talks.
	We must not engage in any more serious than this.
	Let's remember history, ladies and gentlemen.
	As George Santiana said, those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it.
	Bill Clinton armed North Korea with nuke technology.
	And now his people are out there opposing military action because they're appeasers.
	All of these failed Carter rights and Clintonids telling us what to do, failed Carter rights and Clinton's mounting a political attack against Rumsfeld.
	Which is ultimately aimed at George W. Bush.
	As for McCain's worry here that about Vietnam, oh, this is worse than Vietnam because I mean the Vietnamese didn't chase us around.
	These guys want to chase us all over the place.
	It's astoundingly ignorant stuff.
	We lost 58,000 people in Vietnam.
	The fact that this enemy comes after us is not a problem of our making.
	They came after us when we had no troops in Iraq at all.
	And this is where they lay the groundwork for all this is Bush's fault.
	If Bush hadn't gone to Iraq, why none of this would be happening?
	Oh, 9-11 would have happened, the first World Trade Center would.
	This is absurd, folks.
	The enemy, this enemy, unlike the North Vietnamese, isn't fighting over territory.
	The North Vietnamese were just fighting over North and South Vietnam.
	This bunch is fighting to impose a religious fascist view on everybody on this planet.
	And they will eventually come for the Richard Holbrooks of the world.
	And they will eventually come with all these uh pinhead elitist diplomats who somehow think they're above all of these things happening to them.
	This war is going to be longer than the Vietnam War.
	I mean the war on terrorism is.
	And that's what leads me into the concern about depending on who the next president is.
	Are we going to surrender?
	We just gonna get out and say that's not worth it.
	It's Bush's fault anyway.
	Who knows what the next president will do, particularly if he's uh Democrat.
	Quick time out.
	We'll be back after this.
	Stay with us.
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	Rush Limbaugh serving humanity.
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	Simply by showing up.
	800-282-2882.
	You know, there's there's something uh that we can glean, and there's something that we can learn as we watch the left's attitude about Iran.
	Which is basically, you better not do anything, Bush.
	You better not do anything.
	They're lying.
	They'll never use a nuclear weapon.
	You better just go talk to them one on one, but you better not you better not do anything, Bush.
	Their attitude about Iran, ladies and gentlemen, proves that they have been lying about Iraq all along.
	Because today the Democrats, the left, they act like they only opposed Iraq in hindsight because it really wasn't a threat, implying they clearly would have supported the action if the threat was real.
	Well, Iran is real, and look at their attitude.
	They've wanted it both ways on Iraq.
	John Kerry, I voted before it before I voted against it.
	They couldn't wait to get in line to support the Iraq resolution of force because it was going into the 2002 midterms.
	They just couldn't wait.
	They were in line, hustling each other out of the way of the cameras and microphones, they could be the first to say what a dangerous guy Saddam is, what a dangerous threat this is, how bad the weapons of mass destruction are.
	We gotta go do this now.
	Then, when the first signs of trouble in the aftermath came in, they decided, you know what?
	We've got the drive-by media on our side.
	We'll just forget we ever said any of that, and we'll cast a new position.
	A new position is we were never for this.
	We knew the intelligence was false.
	Bush lied to us.
	This is a mistake.
	We gotta get out.
	Bush is creating terrorists.
	These people are the dishonest ones.
	These are the ones trying to fool you.
	They're the ones trying to make you believe that they're different than they are.
	These are the people that cannot be trusted, either when you hear what they say, or to lead this country, or where this country's national security is concerned.
	Because all of a sudden they say if we had known the threat was real, it would have been better.
	Well, what is Iran if it's not real?
	And yet, look at their position on that.
	Don't do anything.
	Blame Bush.
	You but make make Bush out to be the problem with Iran.
	And a potential response.
	Dave in Albany, uh, New York, I'm glad you waited.
	Welcome to the EIB network.
	U.S. Air Force Global Reach, Global Power, diddos to you, Rush.
	How are you today?
	Fine, sir.
	Thank you.
	Oh, thank you.
	And and I'd like to use just their first names, but Tracy and Karen, too.
	I'm in the military, and they used your program, and I found in my email one day that I was going to get the limbaugh letter because some people like to donate to military folks.
	They're in Alabama, and I can't thank you and them enough.
	Thank you very much.
	It's um very interesting to see what's going on here with these generals.
	I bet, and I don't have it, and I bet your folks do.
	They're Lexus Nexus will show, because much like Rathergate, you'll probably find that a bunch of these generals were saying nothing but positive, supportive things, both the Rumsfeld, the effort, and the things that were going on over there prior to this.
	This just seems awfully convenient and awfully useful to the left that all of a sudden now these guys are to be believed and trusted at their word because it's against Rumsfeld and it's against our president.
	Well, uh interesting and interesting point.
	Um in the first place, the the uh the generals prior to their retirement, of course, would support and say things if they did publicly.
	The White House, by the way, has said that the guy that really uh uh confused them most is Batiste, Lieutenant General Batiste, the most recent to join the group uh that he introduced Rumsfeld in 2004.
	This is the man who can help us defeat terrorism, praised him to the hilt to the troops, uh, and has now done a 180.
	So going out and get these guys and saying these things uh uh when they were uh active duty and and serving would not show that much because they could say, yeah, I had to tow the party liners, a uniform quote of military justice.
	But former Clinton CentCom commander Anthony Zinny, and one of the leaders, by the way, of the six groups of uh or this group of six generals, he's the most prominent of these retired generals attacking Rumsfeld.
	Anthony Zinny now says that in the run-up to the war in Iraq, quote, what bothered me was that I was hearing a depiction of the intelligence that didn't fit what I knew.
	There was no solid proof that I ever saw that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, unquote.
	However, in early 2000, this is before Bush became president.
	In early 2000, Anthony Zinney told Congress, quote, Iraq remains the most significant near-term threat to U.S. interests in the Arabian Gulf region.
	He added that Iraq probably is continuing clandestine nuclear research and retains stocks of chemical and biological munitions.
	Even if Baghdad reverses its course and surrendered all WMD capabilities, it remains scientific, technical, and industrial inf uh infrastructure to replace agents and munitions within weeks or months.
	That's Admiral Anthony Zinny testifying before Congress in early 2000 as to the dire threat that Saddam and his work weapons program posed.
	This is back.
	We've gone back over this.
	I don't know how many times we've got you all the quotes from all the Democrats and all the Republicans and all the drive-by media from 1998, 1999, who were all saying the exact things that Bush said leading into 2003 and up to the uh start of the Iraq war.
	And here now comes General Zinny.
	Who was saying this as an admiral I guess General Zinny saying the same thing while Bill Clinton was still president?
	He was Clinton's CENTCOM commander.
	So your instincts, Dave, are correct.
	Zinny has done a 180.
	And all it took was a change of party affiliation in the White House.
	Seems to me, once a Republican gets in the White House, or once we're actually going to take action on this threat.
	Nobody ever doubted Clinton would do anything serious, so they're free to go out and rattle the sabers and talk about how tough Saddam is, how dangerous it is.
	But of course, Clinton brought in the wise man.
	There was counsel and there was advice, and we were all told we couldn't with it anyway, and so why is there cooler heads prevailed?
	And then we elected a leader who saw the same intelligence that Clinton had, the rest of the world had post-9-11.
	What the hell would you do if that was your job to defend and protect the country and the Constitution?
	What would you do?
	Well, it's what we did.
	And now all these people who don't want to be associated with what they think might be a failure, or who have other uh motives involved, are doing 180s on what they previously said was the same dire threat that George W. Bush cited.
	You figure it out.
	I don't think I even need to Explain this to you.
	This is this is pure politics, pure and simple, and this is a heat-seeking missile that aims to go through Rumsfeld and hit the Oval Office.
	We'll be back after this.
	And we're back with uh well, we gotta conclude our busy, busy broadcast hour.
	But I gotta have a pop quiz for you people coming up in the uh in the next hour uh based on the scentillating, timely, penetrating, hard-hitting, brilliant monologues that comprised our first hour.
	It's a short little five or six question pop quiz.
	And uh uh you'll undoubtedly get all of them right because they're easy to answer correctly.
	That's the point.
	So sit tight, we'll come back and continue.
	Your phone calls will be part of the mix, and we got lots of other stuff uh to discuss as well.

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