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June 2, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:19
June 2, 2006, Friday, Hour #3
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Ha, how are you?
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen.
Broadcast excellence that you've come to know, love, demand, and expect is back.
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If you want to be on the program on Friday, by the way, we go to the phones.
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Talk about whatever you wish.
I don't want to switch gears.
We we've been sort of uh uh meandering through the the news today and having a little yuck here and there, a little fun, but I want to move on to this Hadithha uh business.
And and by the way, it's not just Hadithha, I don't know if you've noticed, but there are three or four now stories of uh uh Marines that seem to be focusing on Marines this week, uh who have been found guilty of murder, committing atrocities uh under allegation of having done all that.
Uh and uh Daniel Henninger today in the Wall Street Journal has a piece thinking that the Iraq syndrome uh has been reached, that uh the American people are finally he's worried that we're at that point where uh all of these atrocities being uh uh reported are just gonna wear the American people out on all this.
I want to deal with this uh in a number of ways.
Ben Stein has a great piece today, too, in the American Spectator Online.
But first, from the uh from the New York Times today denouncing what they called repeated acts of violence by American forces against innocent civilians.
Iraq's top leaders said today that they would demand that American officials turn over their investigative files on the Iraq deaths at Hadith as they vowed to conduct their own inquiry.
All right, now um forgive me on this.
This appears to me to be a hanging curveball.
What are we talking about in Hadithha?
Twenty-four deaths.
It get conflicting reports on this, 15, 24, I think I think the number is 24 deaths.
So 24 deaths, and the Iraqi leadership is now having a cow and demanding to investigate.
Uh how many how many Iraqi civilians do you think have been murdered by insurgents, the so-called insurgents, the terrorists that are operating over there?
This is the one thing, you know, when you hear when you hear Jack uh cut and run Mertha describing these atrocities.
I haven't heard one opponent of the war describe our enemies anywhere near the way they describe the United States military.
And I have the same reaction too when I read this story in the New York Times.
All right, so you want to have the investigating files.
Okay, so you're outrageous.
You're gonna demand this and demand that.
Well, fine and dandy.
Well, uh we're on your side, you guys, and far more of your innocent civilians have been killed and murdered.
Um by insurgents, and we don't see any investigations.
I know you're at war with them and so forth, but this outrage here is just I I think it's a faked orgasm for political purposes.
Uh you know, it's it's it's it is what it is.
In Hadithha, and there are people in Congress who have been briefed by some in the military who say it's gonna be very bad.
Uh I've you know withheld comment until it's the investigation is done.
Too many of these things.
Like somebody was just cleared in a court martial trial the other day for murder.
Uh and and uh another man had written a letter, I think some newspaper, New York Times something, uh, who had been falsely accused of these kinds of atrocities.
And he was writing in context of uh of Hadith.
And in Hadithha, we know that the insurgents don't wear uniforms, and if uh if they're being uh uh protected and housed and hidden uh by some so-called Iraqi citizens and so forth, and the Marines learn this, uh especially in the midst of one of their own being killed by one of these IEDs that goes off under a Humvee.
Uh a crack.
It's entirely possible.
I just I'm not defending anything.
I just uh I've learned enough uh as a student here of the drive-by media that the drive-by media is the drive-by media because of this, the drive-by media, and they can't wait for stories like this.
They turned Abu Grab into something that it wasn't, and they turned Club Gitmo into something that well, you got a hunger strike now going on in a club gitmo.
You know, I mean, the menu down there is fine.
They have a thriving merchandise business at Club Gitmo, and everybody seems destined here to put that out of business, and I'm gonna stand up for it.
Now to Ben Stein's piece.
Keeping the faith.
First, I keep running into men and women of the left who tell me that going into Iraq unprepared and undermanned and underarmed was the worst foreign policy and defense mistake this government's ever made.
Certainly it was one hell of a mistake.
That's obvious and cruel for all concerned, and to continue Donald Rumsfeld's stewardship of the war effort when he has made such a hash of it, strikes me as extremely peculiar.
The man has his points, but guiding the Iraq war isn't one of them.
This is Ben Stein saying this.
And uh by way of bringing you up to speed, you will not find uh a bigger advocate for the U.S. military than Ben Snain.
He had a piece on Memorial Day that was practically crying writing.
Uh and his basic theme was how in the world do we ever pay these people back?
Uh the people that have uh joined and volunteered, gone over to their families.
How do we ever pay them back?
Once the memorials are over for those who've died, what do we do to pay them back?
I mean, so don't don't misunderstand any of this as I share excerpts with it.
This is a man that's uh you you won't f you won't find anybody more uh devoted uh to the to the men and women of the U.S. military nor their mission than Ben Stein.
He says we're three or years three years into it.
We've we spent uh many lives, lots of dollars that we can ill afford, and we're worse off there than we were three weeks after the hostilities commenced.
With the best troops on the planet and the best weapons on earth, we're clearly in a desperate mess, but it's a small mess so far.
It pales by comparison with FDR's acts of hostility to Japan and Germany, provoking Pearl Harbor when he knew or should have known that we were drastically unprepared for world war.
When FDR taunted Japan, stopped shipping them supplies that we had always sent them and practically begged them to go to war with us, it was probably the right moral thing to do.
In fact, it surely was, but he was the most popular president of all time.
He had fairly good but far from perfect control of Congress.
He could have made sure we were better armed before he got us into war.
The unpreparedness of U.S. forces caused us terrible losses at Pearl Harbor and far worse ones in the Philippines.
They left hundreds of U.S. vessels go to the bottom along with their brave crews under the U-boat onslaught.
Yes, he learned and he geared up for total war, but the mistakes at the beginning were extremely bad.
This is a far bigger foreign policy mistake than Iraq.
FDR caving in at Yalta, baiting the greatest man of all time, Winston Churchill, and instead siding with the worst killer of his own people of all time, Stalin, to create a Soviet slave empire in Eastern Europe.
That was a far worse mistake than the Iraq War, and it cost far more lives.
Sending captured Russians back to Stalin to be murdered by the hundreds of thousands, that was a far worse mistake than Iraq.
Getting us into Vietnam, that was a gift of JFK and LBJ, done under the falsest of pretexts, especially by LBJ.
That was a far worse mistake than Iraq.
I don't think anyone believes that we'll lose 50,000 men in Iraq, but that's how many we lost in Vietnam thanks to an adventure started by gung-ho warriors who had no clue what they were in for, just like Iraq, only far worse.
Iraq was a mistake, and it's turning out badly.
We lacked the national will to win this war.
We had no good reason to be there in the first place, thank you, CIA.
We were supposed to not get into any more wars that we didn't absolutely need to be in.
If we did get into them, we were supposed to go in with enough force to win.
We screwed up every part of this, and it's a mistake, but the worst foreign defense policy mistake of all time, very far from it.
It's kind of dovetails with my little hindsight view yesterday that if we'd have gone in there with real shock and awe, the way we used to fight wars, such as World War II, then we'd well, who knows, but it's it's clear what what Stein's saying here.
We don't fight wars the way we used to, and we've been talking about this on this program for quite a while now.
We fight them minimally.
For a host of PC reasons.
Now, Hadith, he writes, another disaster.
There are explanations, obviously, if Marines are toughest and roughest, see their friends blown to bits by terrorists hidden by the general population, they're gonna be furious at the general population.
What is truly incredible about the war in Iraq is how few civilians U.S. forces have killed.
In World War II, it was explicit doctrine to bomb, blow up, incinerate, and suffocate as many Germans and Japanese as we could, and he means citizens.
We firebombed cities in Germany and Japan around the clock for years.
We attack civilian neighborhoods explicitly, under the inspiration of the British who wanted measure for measure, as Churchill said against the Nazis, for bombing British cities, and rightly so.
We set off firestorms that killed tens of thousands in a night in Japan and Germany.
Children were incinerated in their mother's arms, whole districts, and all the people in them were simply erased from history.
This was the way we, the best, the kindest nation on earth by far, fought the biggest war of all time.
We are not talking about killing twelve civilians, but killing millions.
Now, under President Bush, we didn't carpet bomb Baghdad.
We do not level whole neighborhoods, though we easily could.
We risk and lose lives every day to fight and kill or capture only the guilty.
This is new in the history of warfare in the past sixty years.
In a war that's been going on for three miserable years, there have been only a handful of reports of civilian deaths that U.S. hands.
Any is too many, but let's not kid ourselves.
Mr. Bush and the incredibly brave and decent men and women who are fighting this war are fighting with a restraint that is novel in the history of war.
I don't excuse the killers.
I do offer some understanding and some context about them and about history.
Things could be a lot worse, and we have every reason to be deeply proud of the men and women who fight the most inhuman killers on the planet, almost always by extremely humane rules of engagement.
Yeah, Mr. Bush has made some dreadful mistakes, but a look into the past offers some hope that we've gotten through far worse mistakes and gone on to a wary happiness.
There's a lot of ruin in a nation, as Adam Smith so brilliantly said.
The key is to ascend the learning curve and to keep the faith with those in harm's way in Hadithha and everywhere else.
Which, after the break, will take me to Daniel Henninger today and his fear that we are beyond the point of being able to keep faith with those on the ground in Iraq.
Back in just a second.
We're back open line Friday.
El Rushbow moving on, Daniel Henninger today in the Wall Street Journal.
Just some excerpts here.
The Vietnam syndrome, a loss of confidence in the efficacy of American military engagement was mainly a failure of U.S. elites.
But it's different this time.
This presidency has been steadfast in war, no matter.
In a piece this week on the White House's efforts to rally the nation to the idea of defeating terrorism abroad to thwart another attack on the U.S., the AP's Nedra Pickler wrote that that hasn't kept the violence and unrest out of the headlines every day.
This time the despondency looks to be penetrating the general population, and the issue isn't just body counts, it's more than that.
The missions in Iraq and Afghanistan grew from the moral outrage of September 11th.
U.S. troops, the best this country has yet produced, went overseas to defend us against repeating that day.
Now it isn't just that the war on terror has proven hard.
The men and women fighting for us, the magnificent ninety-nine percent, are being soiled in a repetitive public way that's unbearable.
The greatest danger at this moment is that the American public will decide that it wants to pull back because it's concluded that when the U.S. goes in, it always gets hung out to dry.
Two major military reports will come out soon on the Hadith incident, and no one will gainsay justice if that is required.
But the atmosphere around this event's gonna get uncontrollably manic, as I predicted yesterday.
And that's gonna feed the dark inward turning sentiments already poisoning the country's mood over issues like the immigration debate.
Good for Democrats, don't count on it.
After all of this, the public appetite for a democratic president's humanitarian military intervention in a darfer or East Timor will be close to zero.
One suspects that U.S. troops were party to some awful events in the Pacific and European theaters of World War II, all gone in the mists of history and the enemy's defeat.
But not now.
General Ciarelli's magnificent 99.9% notwithstanding.
It's the phenomenon of the so very public 0.01% at Abu Ghraib on the Afghan street at Hadith.
That is a break the breaking America's will this time.
Now that's uh that's uh uh Daniel Henniger in the Wall Street Journal, the uh Wall Street Journal Opinion Journal dot com today.
I don't know how accurately he represents your attitude, uh the attitude of most of the people in uh in this audience, but clearly, and I think most people come to this conclusion and do this on the basis of of polls, but I suspect that he's also writing of a fear he has that if it hasn't happened yet that it will.
Uh and one of the things that uh is not really focused on here, let's try to combine a couple things here with Ben Stein and Henniger, because they have some areas of commonality.
Uh we didn't have we might have had rogue bands committing atrocities in World War II, but as Stein points out, our policy in World War II was to kill as many citizens of these countries as possible.
That's what that was the definition of winning a war.
And we don't fight them that way anymore.
And we all know why.
I mean, you can you can you can say it's the word guilt or you can political correctness or what have you.
But the one thing that was absent in World War II was any news stories, any and all news stories constantly harping on the crimes and the atrocities and the immorality of U.S. forces.
Uh the drive-by media today has had a profound uh impact on this because they will not let this go, as the Nedra Pickler uh quote cited by Daniel Henniger illustrates.
Uh, and it's it's many people who live inside the Beltway, as Henninger does, wonder how this can be overcome.
When you know, one-tenth of one percent or one hundredth of one percent of our entire fighting force gets involved in these kinds of atrocities, it comes to define the whole military.
And that is how the the drive-by media is attempting to get this done.
They're attempting to, and and the Democratic Party as well, and the American left uh are all attempting to besmirch and impugn the entire U.S. military based on incidents like this.
They live for these incidents.
They live for the Abu Grabs, they live for the club getmos, they live for the Hadiths, they live for the body counts, because they too have an agenda.
And their agenda is oriented toward destroying President Bush, and they will destroy whatever they have to in the process of destroying President Bush, even if that means losing against this enemy, even if it means sabotaging the effort against this enemy.
We even have a federal judge in Detroit, appointed by Jimmy Carter in 1979, is going to go ahead with hearings and a legal challenge to a warrantless domestic surveillance program run by the NSA, the U.S. District Judge's name is um Anna Diggs Taylor.
She also criticized the Justice Department for failing to respond to the legal challenge.
So the ACLU in Detroit and the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York have filed lawsuits against the NSA program.
They did this in January, saying it violates Americans' rights to free speech and to privacy.
So here we can't even this sort of illustrates the folly of New York being all upset too, particularly the liberals.
They're upset that they're not getting 40 million dollars that they thought they were going to get, and yet nobody can tell me what that 40 million dollars gonna do to guarantee or to protect or even uh make progress against preventing a future attack.
But the foreign surveillance program is designed to do just that, and it's being undermined by the very liberals who in New York are ex just i i i i beside themselves that they're not gonna get their their homeland security money.
Now we're either at war or we're not, and you either want us to win or you don't.
And there are a few in this country who don't want us to win, uh and many people are starting to have fears now that they're succeeding in creating fatigue among enough people uh to create a pull out here, which i if if we if we do a mogadishu in Iraq, folks, or Afghanistan, it'll be a disaster we haven't seen in our lifetimes.
Open line Friday, it is back to the phones we go to Hawaii.
This is Ken.
I'm glad you called, sir.
Aloha Kakayaka from the People's Democratic Republic of Hawaii, Rush.
Thank you, sir.
It's a pleasure to have you with us.
It's the uh hurricane season again, and I I want to tell you about a hurricane that's blowing through Hawaii and it's on its way to a neighborhood near you.
Uh this is a bill in the Senate that will be on the floor of the Senate next week.
You talked about this bill last summer, uh, but it's back again.
It right has risen from the dead.
It's the Akaka bill, it's the Hawaiian government reorganization bill known as S3064.
It has a new number as of last week.
And uh this is a bill to create a phony Indian tribe where there's never been a tribe before.
There'd be four hundred thousand people throughout the United States eligible to join up with this tribe.
Uh the purpose of it is to protect a whole bunch of illegal racial entitlement programs that have been in place for many years that are now being challenged in court.
But what makes this bill really bad and why we've got to light up the phones in the Senate and tell them to to uh not allow this bill to come to the floor or to defeat it if it does come to the floor.
Um there's a theory of the Constitution in this bill that will allow Congress to create one of these phony tribes for any racial group in the country.
The the impact this would have just on Hawaii, where we've been able to do that.
Let me s let me let me stop you here, Ken.
I I know I know a little bit about this, but I got a question for you.
I know the way they're gonna do this, I think if you don't have to have hardly one drop of of of uh Hawaiian blood will get you into this tribe, correct?
Exactly right.
Now, for what purpose?
I want you to tell us for what purpose are they creating this tribe that stick to stick with Hawaii for for a moment here.
What what's the purpose of creating this so-called tribe?
Well, the main purpose, there are over a hundred and sixty federally funded programs that give special benefits just for people who have at least one drop of native Hawaiian blood.
And uh those programs are unconstitutional, they're coming under challenge in the courts.
And so why are they do but the point is let's let's cut to the chase here.
Why is a cacao doing this?
This is this is let's let's the motivation first.
From what I understand, correct me if I'm wrong, from what I understand, what's driving this is a resentment over the uh United States conquering Hawaii, if you will, if I use that word, and making it a state, and essentially turning it back over to so-called native Hawaiians who will only have uh one drop uh that's all they will require, one drop of Hawaiian blood.
Um and it's it's it's not really a secession bill, uh, but but it's it's uh it's an attempt to establish an entirely different race, tribe, whatever you will, uh uh that's distinct from Americans in an American state, correct?
Yes.
Uh the bill itself, of course, doesn't say anything about secession, but it will give political power and economic power to people who are very interested in secession.
Uh in 1993, Congress passed an apology resolution that said uh, you know, back in 1893, the U.S. sent a few troops ashore uh to help put down rioting in Honolulu, and because of that, it's our fault, America's fault, that the government of the Kingdom of Hawaii was overthrown.
Well, that's nonsense.
There's a lot of evidence that that's just false.
But that apology resolution is there.
And when that was passed, Senator Slade Gorton on the floor of the Senate gave a warning that the logical consequences of this resolution would be the secession of Hawaii.
Because if the United States really was guilty for overthrowing uh a foreign government and installing its own government, then um the the proper reparations for that would be to uh make Hawaii independent once again.
On the basis that this would grant self-rule to native Hawaiians only, and native Hawaiians being defined as anybody with a drop of blood.
Right, and they're not particularly native.
I want to emphasize that point.
Uh so-called native Hawaiians are mostly non-native in their ancestry.
Uh they're Japanese and Filipino and Chinese and white, and they live among all the different neighborhoods in Hawaii and all different uh occupations.
They're rich and poor and everywhere in between.
We all work and live and prey together.
Right.
And the the impact on Hawaii, if you want to make an analogy for the entire United States, uh, it would be like taking all the people of Mexican ancestry in the U.S., plus all the people of African ancestry in the United States, put them all together, that makes up about 20% of the U.S. population, create a government just for them.
They have government powers, they can uh uh make up their own laws and negotiate for money and land and power, maybe set aside several states just for themselves, sell cigarettes that this would have on Hawaii.
Uh but there are 400,000 uh ethnic Hawaiians and they're living in the entire United States.
Uh sixty thousand in California alone, a hundred thousand in the other forty-eight states, two hundred and forty thousand in Hawaii.
And the theory behind this bill would be exactly the same as in with the Mexican Americans.
You know, the theory here is that uh there was an area in the United States, either it's Hawaii or it's the southwestern U.S. that was lived in by people who were indigenous there who had lived there for a long time.
Then the U.S. came in and took over that territory without the consent of the people who were living there, and now as a result of that, those people should have a right to uh form their own government and what is what it what is going on here, the way the way a caca, and I love saying his name, uh Senator Daniel Akaka, he's he's he's uh uh promoting this and has been promoting this is simply a self-esteem thing.
Um but it folks, this does come right out of multiculturalism uh and and it comes out of the uh the oppression past and the uh white superior past, the white dominance past of the United States, and it attempts to criminalize that.
And then uh it's almost a reparations bill in a sense, in that it proclaims guilt, acknowledges guilt.
Clinton went around apologized, uh, and we're gonna give the country back to the people who took it.
And you may think this sounds come on, this is I mean, it's Rush.
I mean, I can understand just trying to do something for his people out there.
You take a look at what's happening in the illegal immigration movement, and you take a look at what some of the people supporting endless open borders are talking about and tell me that this is not something that down the road, who knows how many generations or years could happen.
You have to understand, and I'm I'm not trying to be paranoid about anything here.
I've understood for many, many moons now, uh little Indian lingo there, as an adult, that there are people in this country who hate it and who despise what we've done, and this is right up their alley.
This is this is a penalty.
This is this is uh this is taking back what was originally someone else's that we uh appropriated illegally uh with imperialistic tendencies and so forth.
There are more people in this country.
A lot of them are teaching on college campaign today, uh you would believe.
And you know, you you you a lot of people have would have said uh the welfare state's never gonna get that big FDR, never intended social security to become a Medicare, oh nine billion is the most it's ever gonna cost.
Once these things start, uh they don't go away.
Now, over time they're They they they might they might uh implode of their of their own immorality uh and and so forth, but uh uh it's still gonna be an arduous path waiting for all that to uh to happen.
So I I uh it's this is uh this bill has a lot of people concerned for the very reasons that uh that Ken is expressed here.
Ken, I appreciate the call moving on to Chicago.
Nick, you're next.
Welcome to the EIB network.
Hi, Russia, it's an honor to talk to you.
Thank you, sir.
Um I was just calling about your your comparison to uh the killing of civilians in World War II to the killing of uh the people in Hadita.
Yeah.
And I think the public outrage in World War II wasn't as extreme because we're fighting the nations of Germany and Japan and it was an these people were contributing to the economies of war uh these the Axis nations, and you know, we're with our with their economic contributions, they were helping those countries war effort.
But these people are not fighting a war with Iraq, we're fighting a war in Iraq, and these people probably were not contributing to any terrorist effort or anything like that, and that makes them more energy than the civilians.
I understand what you are saying.
All that I was attempting to do here was to draw some comparison.
Remember the th the theme of this uh presentation was are Americans losing their will for this.
Have Americans lost their will to actually fight a war necessary in a ness as necessary to win it.
And that's the context.
And I'm simply pointing out that in World War II, uh, where we were also attacked at Pearl Harbor, and let's not forget this.
The Japanese attacked us first and we went into Europe next.
We didn't get around to dealing with the Japanese till after we had entered World War II in the European theater.
Uh and and the Germans have never attacked us.
Uh and you can say the same thing about Iraq.
The Germans never attacked us, they'd attacked our allies, and they were on the march, but they hadn't attacked us.
What the hell were we doing there when we had Japan attacking us?
My only point with this is that what used to happen in wars as uh rote is now something that it's uh begin will the American people put up with it.
I know we weren't quote unquote attacked by a nation on nine-eleven or in any other terrorist attack, and that has changed uh uh some of the procedures and so forth.
But we don't really know yet who these citizens were.
We only know uh and it's gonna get far worse.
We don't know if these citizens were aiding and abating the insurgents, or we don't know if the insurgents are kidnapped family members and were pressuring them uh into hiding insurgents.
The insurgents live among the citizens of Iraq.
They're cowards and they hide behind women and children.
They hide in the mosques and so forth, precisely because they know we're not gonna go there and we're not gonna bomb them.
Uh but we don't yet know.
Uh now, in the case of a of a pregnant woman that was running away and got killed, the odds are that uh she's not a terrorist and so but we don't really know that yet.
Uh and yet so many of us are ready to cast judgment on the Marines in this episode based simply on initial military reports before anything official uh has been mentioned.
Uh I just uh you know, we don't know what kind of attacks like this might have occurred when we had boots on the ground in Germany or France or elsewhere in the European theater, or once we got over to China, Burma and that theater.
We don't know what our tr we we didn't have media telling us about it.
Uh and and so we just we just don't know.
All I'm telling you is that there are people concerned that because of a lack of history education, a lack of context and a lack of understanding.
That I've always said it.
As I have grown older, and I as I've hosted this program, one of the things that's always worried me, aside from the lack of decent history education and public school system in this country is this that as we grow further and further away from the Great Wars, World War I and World War II, in which we were victorious, uh without succeeding wars in which we were similarly victorious, we're gonna have generation after generation who will never remember an America victorious at war.
They're only gonna remember an America that got hung out to dry, who went places it had no business going, uh was humiliated and left.
We got Vietnam and that.
We got Somalia and that Mogadishu.
Uh people don't think of Kosovo and Serbia as a successful war because that was fought from 15,000 feet, and that place is still a mess.
Uh it we we we didn't fix anything over there.
Uh so I that that troubles me.
And that's the only reason I bring this context up.
Uh and it's a reason I was talking yesterday about, you know, looking, admittedly in hindsight, had we gone in there, uh, meaning Iraq, and and and leveled the place like we would have done in previous wars.
If we had cited them as a you remember the reason that with this preemptive.
Uh 9-11 had happened.
We had all the intelligence and evidence, the world had it as far back as 1998, weapons of mass destruction.
Hit me once, fine, hit me twice, you're not going to get away with it.
And and uh uh if we would have gone in there and leveled the place as we have in past wars, circumstances today wouldn't exist.
All I'm saying.
Gotta run back in just a second.
Okay, quick.
Anybody out there know the name of the group that recorded this tune that's playing currently in the bumper rotation.
Well, of course the broadcast engineer knows it.
It's Katrina and the waves.
And I think she's from Kansas, is where she grew up.
Katrina the w uh well, geez, this is the eighties sometime, isn't it?
Uh at any rate, uh all quiet, uh, ladies and gentlemen, on day two of hurricane season.
LA Times has gotten around to writing about Congressman William Jefferson, Democrat Louisiana.
And it's a rehash of the puff piece that was in the New York Times on Sunday.
Poverty marked dollar bill.
That's his nickname.
The subheadline is this.
Many in Representative Jefferson's district who admired his successful rise now feel let down after a probe uncovered $90,000 in cash in his freezer.
But don't worry about that because the LA Times rides to the rescue here.
Congressman William J. Jefferson, they don't say Democrat Louisiana here.
It's one of the reason why I do, was once famous in Louisiana circles as the sharecropper's son who made his way to Harvard, steered by parents who preached the value of education.
Today, Jefferson is infamous nationally as the Louisiana Democrat who stashed $90,000 of alleged bribe money in his kitchen freezer.
Those who have watched his career's spectacular rise and potential fall believe the terrible poverty he escaped was ultimately his undoing.
He rose to become his state's first African American congressman since Reconstruction, but people who know him say he still had a thirst for wealth.
His perceived flaw among his peers has always been that shaped by his humble beginnings.
Bill loved money and desperately wanted to be a rich man, said Alan Katz, a New Orleans-based political consultant who has known Congressman William Jefferson, Democrat Louisiana, for more than 30 years.
It was the Deep South kind of hardship that shaped African-American backgrounds.
One of ten children, I thought it was eight in the New York Times, family keeps growing out there.
One of ten children, Jefferson, now 59, grew up in one of the poorest parts of Louisiana, good with a hunting rifle, told a story that showcased his dead aim.
If his father needed three rabbits, he would give his son three bullets.
But according to Katz, the family told the story another way.
They had a gun.
They could only afford one bullet at a time.
If he missed, the family didn't eat.
Kid you not.
this.
Yes.
So they sent little dollar bill out there to kill the rabbits for family dinner.
Gave one bullet's all they could afford, one bullet a day, I guess.
And if if a dollar bill missed, family didn't eat.
So once again here, uh, ladies and gentlemen, uh, we are treated to a piece which attempts to justify the actions of Congressman William Jefferson, Democrat Louisiana, based on the abject poverty forced upon him by an unjust racist white supremacist United States.
And we must understand the rage.
And understand that poverty leads to a desire for wealth.
And how can we possibly hold it against him when he was sent out there with only one bullet every night for dinner?
I just have one question before we go here, folks.
How does one dead rabbit feed a family of ten?
Every night, uh, Congressman William Jefferson um I guess small portions.
I guess that's it.
My friends, it's been a sheer delight and a joy to be with you here.
Have a fun and fine weekend.
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