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July 18, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:20
July 18, 2006, Tuesday, Hour #3
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Time Text
Standby on audio soundbites 8, 9, and 10.
And then, oh, yeah, we got to do 12-2.
8, 9, 10, and 12.
All right.
Here we are back.
The cutting edge of societal evolution.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB net.
Oh, I got to print something out here.
Hey, just at a poll in Israel, 9 out of 10, Israelis backed the campaign in southern Lebanon.
Wouldn't you love to see a poll like that in this country where it comes to our entanglements in war around the world?
Greetings, my friends.
My name is Rush Limbaugh, which you knew can recognize the voice, the most recognizable media voice in American radio today.
800-282-2882 is the telephone number.
If you want to be on the program, the email address is rush at EIBnet.com.
Bryant, what's with all the clicking on the phone lines?
We're working on that.
Yeah, we are working on it.
We don't know what's causing it.
But when we go to the phone, there's a lot of clicking out there.
When I first hear, I suspect phone taps.
It's just me.
But why would somebody tap a phone you can hear on the radio?
So it's probably not that.
And we are excellence in broad.
Well, no, it's not our taps on the callers.
We're not using that.
See, you made me give it away by commenting on it.
It's not our taps.
I was thinking of somebody else's taps.
But regardless, we are excellence in broadcasting, and that's why it's hard to find because we have the finest equipment state-of-the-art that money and tradeouts can buy.
That little inside baseball.
With all this that's going on, you just know that if you scour the American drive-by media, you'll find the political angle to it.
And it didn't take us long.
A columnist in the Boston Globe, Peter Canellos, Bush fights new crises.
Democrats lie in wait.
I guess the interesting point of this, most Republicans foresaw big political benefits in these votes, the war votes in Iraq.
Democrats, answering to the demands of their core liberal supporters, were now supporting withdrawal, cut and run in Republican campaign parlance.
And Rove has insisted that whatever misgivings voters feel about the Iraq war, they'll always opt for strength over weakness, advancement over pullbacks.
But now the Democratic insistence that the Iraq war is sapping resources seems less like quitting the fight than preserving energy and options for potentially more important fights.
This remains a highly debatable proposition.
Failure in Iraq may still be America's greatest foreign policy danger, but Democratic doubts about Iraq won't seem like cowardice to Americans worried about the nuclear weapons in North Korea or Iran or about the possibility of all-out war in the Middle East.
At some point, though, the Democrats would have to make this point forcefully that they support withdrawal to preserve and enhance American strength, not to surrender.
Well, they've never said that.
So here we have a columnist in the Boston Globe trying to tell the Democrats, look, you've got a golden opportunity here because the country looks at you as a bunch of weak, linguiney-spined, cut-and-run artists.
But now with the outbreak, you can say we only want to get out to preserve our strength for the really important stuff.
And Iraq has never met at a hill of beans, but this nuclear stuff in Iran, this stuff in North Korea, that's where we need to marshal our forces.
He's essentially advising the Democrats, get tough, bring out John Kerry, put on a battle uniform again, get, you know, Martha and mothballs and get Nancy Pelosi out of there and bring some Democrats out who are willing to talk about maybe dealing with the war coming in Iran or whatever we have to do with North Korea.
Now, okay, let's say the Democrats do that.
Do you think at this stage of the game, Democrats could get away with changing their image of cut and run artists, anti-militarists that they are, and all of a sudden overnight do a 180 and convince the American people that all along, all they've been concerned about is this that's happening with Hezbollah in Israel and Iran and North Korea.
All along, that's been their concern.
They just knew Iraq never was a factor.
It never mattered.
They were never saying destroy the military or gibbering them home.
They were saying reposition for the real war.
And we Democrats are the ones that can lead you, America, into that battle.
Anybody think they could get away with that?
Well, the drive-by media, by virtue of this column, is telling them, we'll help you if you do it.
And, you know, these advice columns of the New York Times and other drive-by media outlets of the Democrats on how to get out of their problems are happening more and more frequently.
So make no mistake what this column is.
This is okay.
Democrats, here's your way out of this community.
We've got a golden opportunity here.
But the problem is that the golden opportunity requires you, if you're going to say, we need these forces deployable and we need them reallocated for real war, then you better be prepared to use them for that purpose if such becomes necessary.
And that's what I think most Americans just don't have the confidence to vote for Democrats to do, and that is defend and protect the country.
They're just unwilling to admit that we have such enemies that we would have to defend ourselves against because it's all our fault anyway.
We're creating these enemies.
And if we just change the way we deal with them, well, they won't hate us and they won't want to attack us and they won't want to do any more 9-11.
It's all up to us.
We created this problem.
The Republicans and Bush created it and so forth and so on.
Now, here's this Chris Hitchens piece I was telling you about in the Wall Street Journal.
And I'm not going to read the whole thing to you.
Not that long, but cut to the chase in a shorter amount of time.
It's entitled The Politics of Sabotage.
As the misery and wreckage mount in Lebanon, I find myself wondering what happened to two news items, one old and the other very recent.
The old item concerns the fate of Lieutenant Colonel Ron Arad or Arad, an Israeli Air Force officer whose plane went down over 20 years ago and who was captured by Hezbollah.
He was at one point offered as a bargaining chip for Hezbollah prisoners, and letters from him were produced as proof that he was alive.
A strong but unconfirmed report indicated that he'd been taken to Iran or even sold to Iran, which would have been a fairly extreme form of rendition.
In any event, Hezbollah's Lebanese chieftain, Hassan Nasrallah, has since announced that Lieutenant Colonel Arad is dead and that his remains have been lost so that his family has no information and nothing to bury.
We may well deplore the promiscuity of Israel's intervention or lack of its proportion, but the blowing up of the bridges and other interruptions of all air and sea traffic possess a certain grim rationale.
The freshly kidnapped Israeli soldiers are not.
If the Israeli defense forces can help it, or are not, I should say, if the Israeli Defense Forces can help it, these kidnapped soldiers are not going to be transferred north to end up as anonymous meat in some dungeon run by Bashir al-Assad or Mahmoud Ahmadinezad when one thinks of what currently happens to Syrian or Iranian civilians held by these two men.
The more recent story has also become buried in the rubble.
Until a very few weeks ago, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was confronting the Hamas-led government with a very important decision.
If you do not recognize the newly elected government of Israel as a legitimate negotiating partner, he told them, I will order a referendum among the Palestinians on the single issue of that recognition.
He had at his disposal an important letter signed by several respected Palestinian political prisoners that called for a two-state solution on this basis.
And he was also cutting with the grain of important resolutions by the European Union and other concerned international interlocutors.
He also knew what many people forget.
Hamas did not win a majority of the votes in the Palestinian elections and only hold a tenuous supermajority of the parliamentary seats.
Hamas made it very clear they did not relish this proposal, the ultimatum point of which was just coming due.
Does it not seem obvious that the intention of the various provocations launched from Gaza, from the missiles to the first abduction of an Israeli soldier, were designed precisely to make this referendum impossible?
And does it not seem at least very likely that the Hezbollah operations on Israel's northern border have been implicitly coordinated to assist Hamas in this respect?
So here yet another theory on what is behind all this.
Numerous theories abound, and there's probably a grain of truth in a number of them.
Let's go to the audio soundbites.
A Syrian spokesterist was on the news hour with Jim Lara last night.
Gwynne Eiffel was interviewing the Syrian ambassador to the U.S., Imad Mustafa.
Gwynne Eiffel says, would you reject President Bush's suggestion today that President Assad speak to Hezbollah and end this?
That was such a simplistic approach.
With due respect, President Bush thinks that it only suffices for Secretary Amman to call President Bashar al-Assad through a telephone conversation and voila, everything is resolved.
History did not start six days ago in the Middle East.
We are talking about half a century of occupation, of humiliation, of despair.
Israel is a country that continuously occupy our territories, including the Syrian Golan, the Shaba farms in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, imprisoning our people.
Enough is enough.
Occupation is the mother of all evils, and that should come to an end.
All right, so Assad has nothing to do with this.
What happened?
Assad can't stop this.
And get here.
We'll have further explanation of that.
Gwynne Eiffel says, so Syria has no pull, no influence over Sheikh Nasrallah or Hezbollah.
The myth that Hezbollah is a puppet of Syria or of Iran is a very silly Israeli story.
Hezbollah is part and parcel of the Lebanese social fabric.
These are Lebanese guys.
They are Lebanese people.
They are actually not a militia, a professional militia.
They are the everyday worker, farmer, employer here, medical student there, who also defend their country against the Israeli aggressions.
Oh, okay.
A merry band of farmers and medical students.
Well, screw me.
Well, I had a whole different picture of these guys.
And finally, the question is, Secretary Rice does, as the President suggested today, head for the Middle East to try to broker the conflict, what does she have to bring to the table?
If she's going to do what previous administrations used to do, please remember this, in the past, whenever there was a crisis in the Middle East, the U.S. administration will immediately dispatch an envoy to the Middle East that will actually work with all parties, reaching a settlement, a compromise, calming down the situation.
So it's up to the United States.
They really want to fulfill their role as the world's unique superpower.
They have a moral obligation, or they just want to engage in a PR exercise.
All right, so it's Bush's problem now.
It's Bush and Rice.
They're the ones that have to solve this because we're the superpower.
The individual combatants have no responsibility whatsoever.
And we in City, we have nothing to say.
All right, I'm a little long.
Quick time out here, folks.
So we will be back and roll right on here on the EIB network after this.
All right, Fox News reporting that Israeli jets have attacked a military base outside Beirut.
Israel has a strategy here, folks, and they say it's going to involve weeks of execution.
Look, I'll get back to this in a second, and I'll get to your phone calls with people that still want to talk about this.
But there are other things out there.
I just, you know, I got to get some of these other things.
For example, I'm getting impatient.
I'm 55 years old.
I've been reading this story since I can 40 years that I remember caring about it.
Well, it's July 18th.
We are in the northern hemisphere.
It's July, ladies and gentlemen.
Broiling temperatures in the 90s and beyond gripped large swaths of the country Monday.
Sending people scrambling for the shade, prompting officials to open air-conditioned buildings and take to the streets to rescue the homeless and the elderly.
On the streets of New York, a spot in the shade competed with the parking spaces of valuable commodity.
Men and women made their way under narrow awnings, lounged under trees, and took breaks beneath the umbrellas of hot dog stands.
Any walking around today and you're just burning up, said Ilya Escuerdo, 37 from the Bronx.
I am giving up.
I had a doctor's appointment.
I'm just going to go home to sit near my air conditioner.
Softy.
Played golf in this garbage all last week for crying out loud, folks.
The temperature reached 94 in New York with a heat index of 99.
This is nothing compared to what it was when I arrived in New York in 1988.
Do you know that I saw last week a report?
You know, they told me, you know, it's 100 degrees out there in South Dakota.
Do you know back in the 1930s it got to 116 in some city in Wisconsin?
Yeah, 116 degrees in some city in Wisconsin.
The 1930s.
It's July.
This happens.
It's called summertime.
Why do you think they have this term for it called the dog days of summer?
If you think it's bad now, wait till we get to August.
Kansas City is already back in the 100s.
I remember that 1970s, worked with the Kansas City Royals.
10, 15 days in a row, same thing in Dallas on the same days, 110, 112 degrees.
And down on the artificial surface at Royal Stadium, where I had to go, it was 20 or 30 degrees hotter because this asphalt with a green carpet on top of it.
And the players are out there playing.
It's July.
It's summertime.
And then there's this story from the Associated Press, Dateline Philadelphia.
No relief as nation swelters in heat wave.
Cheryl Kennedy just had one word to describe the stagnant, sticky, downright dense heat that blanketed the downtown business district and most of the nation.
Insanity, she said.
Insanity.
No, it's quite normal.
It's called summertime.
It's called summer, the change of seasons.
It happens every July.
Where have you people been?
Where in the world have you been?
And there is relief.
By the way, who is a Cheryl?
Somebody in Philadelphia knows Cheryl Kennedy.
Tell her there is relief.
It's called September and October and November and December and January and February and March and a lot of April.
Remember that lawsuit that John Kerry's Vietnam buddies filed against these several Vietnam War veterans who sued over a documentary about Senator John Kerry's anti-war activities have dropped their libel suits, leaving just one lawsuit pending over the controversial 2004 film.
Filmmaker Carlton Sherwood says the outcome shows the suits were frivolous complaints filed by Kerry operatives to try to block the film's release in the final weeks of the presidential race.
We've always believed that Kerry controlled these lawsuits, Sherwood said yesterday.
He said the suits were dropped as depositions got underway.
We also felt we were getting a tad too close to the truth about Kerry.
This is a 42-minute documentary.
Some of you might remember this.
It's called Stolen Honor, Wounds That Never Heal.
It charges that Kerry's actions as an anti-war activist after his tour in Vietnam harmed American POWs and questions the veracity of the U.S. atrocities that some veterans reported.
Now, you remember this, I don't know if it was the same thing, but there were documentaries that were going to run on certain television stations and Kerry said, you can't do that.
Well, guess what happens now?
So the Kerry operatives sue claiming libel, so they get to the deposition stage and the Kerry operatives, we're dropping the action.
We're dropping it.
Why would they do that?
Why wouldn't they want to follow through to protect the dignity and the honor of John Kerry, who served in Vietnam, by the way?
Because there's no way Kerry and his operatives could have let this thing go to trial.
The facts would have all come out, and he would have nowhere to hide, nowhere to blame, no way to blame it on a right-wing conspiracy or what have you.
So he just got caught, folks, when it got to the pedal hitting the metal, a rubber hitting the road, when John Kerry's operatives were going to prove that he'd been libeled.
Ah, we're dropping the case.
Dropping the case.
Profitable company, New York Times, is going to shutter a factory it built in 1992 as part of a much-hailed visionary strategery to take advantage of technology.
But now it's just a cost to be cut.
800 jobs, many of them well-paying blue-collar positions, supposedly an endangered species, by the way, will disappear while managerial and professional jobs are being protected.
Now, normally, this would be a juicy target for a series of articles on the front-end business pages of the New York Times, except it won't be here because it is the New York Times that's closing its printing press in New Jersey and eliminating 800 blue-collar jobs.
But the piece des résistance is the comment made by Bill Keller, the editor on this move, which I'll have for you right after this brief timeout.
At the same time, the heat's on.
We're having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
All right.
So they're going to downsize the New York Times.
They're closing a printing press over there in New Jersey.
800 jobs, many of them well-paying blue-collar positions.
I got the hiccups.
I just took a, I just, darn it.
No, I don't want any chocolate vegan cake.
That would only make it worse.
Hang on, let me take a sip of my fruit-flavored water.
Now, people say, why do you do it that way?
Why do you rudely sip water that way?
Dead air, I mean, it never hurt anybody, but I don't want to go by while I'm taking a sip.
You know, so, you know, theater of the mind stuff here, folks.
All right, I think that helped.
Okay, 800 people blown out by the New York Times.
Downsized the paper.
Are they going to make it even smaller?
The paper itself is going to become smaller.
I think it's going to, they're going to, they reduce the width by one and a half inches.
Bill Keller said, well, yes, this is actually going to condense some of the space that we have for news.
We'll be doing more digests of news.
And, of course, Mr. Snirdley is wondering, well, they just make it official and do a treason digest or a terrorism as our friend digest or some such thing.
But that's not the point.
Thomas Lifson, writing about this at the American Thinker, said the Times is well known for its elitism and its unconscious condescension toward those who occupy less lofty stations in life.
Editor Bill Keller let slip a telling remark in remarks reported by the AP.
He said, yeah, closing this printing press over there in New Jersey, that's a much less painful way to go about assuring our economic survival than cutting staff.
Well, wait a second.
The blue-collar workers in New Jersey at the printing press are not staff.
They are considered lowly serfs.
The staff is made up of the people actually at the Times building in Manhattan.
Why?
How come this?
I think it's in Edison, New Jersey that this thing is being shut down.
So 800 people get canned by the New York Times, but they're not important.
They're not staff.
People keep asking me what I think of the Valerie Playme Joe Wilson lawsuit.
Rush, this happened while you were gone.
Why aren't you going to tell us about it?
Why don't you tell us what you think?
As a prelude, let's go to the audio soundbites.
Last night on Countdown, Keith Olberman on PMS NBC, Joe Wilson was the guest, and question.
Your critics, on the other hand, have stressed that the danger could not have been that great if she was photographed for Vanity Fair or you were both seen in the Washington Correspondence dinner.
How would you rectify the idea of the threat with those public appearances?
Mr. Novak's wife is in no danger whatsoever until such time as somebody compromises her identity as a CIA operative, if in fact that's what somebody decides they're going to do, if in fact that is what she is.
It is the fact that Valerie worked in a very sensitive position in the intelligence services that obviously brings about a certain level of security threat to us, which level has been, we've been exposed to it.
There have been threats made to us that have come to our attention through the intelligence community.
So these are not just your right-wing Rush Linboss, Sean Hannity listeners.
Oh, really?
Isn't that interesting?
So he's being threatened, of course, by some of you, but even those beyond the scope of this audience.
Now, when I hear something like this, I'm wondering, those of you in this audience, are you this stupid?
If you have threatened Joe Wilson, his wife, have you said, hi, I am a ditto head, and I am threatening you.
Have you identified yourself as such?
If so, I would like for Mr. Wilson to produce some names or some evidence or proof that some of you have been threatening him or his wife.
And I assume that Sean Hannity would like to have some names too.
If you're going to start throwing around the notion that members of this audience are threatening you, you've got to have proof.
You have to know it.
And then how are you people who are threatening him identifying yourselves?
Most people are over mint tea.
What do you mean?
Oh, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, he was over mint tea when he was in Niger or Niger in the yellow cake.
The bottom line is, I don't know that any of you are so stupid if you actually threaten the guy that you was.
Well, in fact, if somebody's going to do it, they'd probably falsely associate themselves as members of this audience.
But I don't believe it's happening.
I think these people are living illusions.
I think these people both operated in a scam that she set up, coordinated with him, and it has backfired on them.
And it's not produced what they wanted it to produce.
And now they're in trouble.
Novak's column last week blew their whole case out of the water.
Novak said that it was not a partisan gunslinger.
He identified two of the three people that told him who Wilson's wife was.
And no, Novak said that nobody gave him the name, that it was Joe Wilson's wife, and he looked up Wilson's listing in Who's Who in America and found out her name.
And now these people have threatened a lawsuit at all this.
My friend Deborah Saunders at the San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting column on this today.
Valerie Plame is Paula Jones.
Former CIA operative Valerie Plame is the new Paula Jones, if with national security credentials and Washington Beltway Savoir Faire.
Both women filed iffy lawsuits that seem more designed to discredit a president than to prevail in a court of law.
The suit filed last week by Plame and her husband against Bush biggies, Cheney, Libby, Karl Rove is nonsensical.
As CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin put it, I think this lawsuit ranks somewhere between an actual lawsuit and a publicity stunt.
Victoria Tensing, who served in the Reagan administration, said Valerie Plame wasn't fired.
She worked for two and a half years at the CIA after the revelation.
Nobody fired her.
She's got a book deal she would not have had.
And Deborah Saunders adds, Plame's deal to write her memoirs for Steinman and Schuster after a $2.5 million deal with Crown publishing fell through is not stopping the Wilsons from making online solicitations to bankroll counseling them for their potential witness testimony in Libby's trial and or their dubious lawsuit.
They are seeking donations to help them pay for counseling for their upcoming testimony in one or both of these trials.
The biggest similarity, however, between Plame and Jones is that both the Clinton and Bush administrations could have spared themselves a long legal nightmare if either one had not tried to make itself seem more virtuous than it was.
Clinton should have refused to allow Jones' attorneys to depose him.
If he had not lied to Jones' attorneys, Ken Starr would have had no cause to question Monica Lewinsky.
If Bush hadn't promised to fire anybody who illegally leaked Plame's info, or if staffers had told the media that, yeah, they talked about Plain, but they didn't realize her job was classified, then it could have been a one-day story.
Maybe not a one-day story, but surely not a three-year story.
That said, Bush haters are mistaken in putting Wilson on a pedestal as his lawsuit is clearly misleading to wit.
The suit cited a May 2003 New York Times column written by Nick Christoph about Wilson's 2000 trip to Niger to check out allegations Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Africa.
According to the column, the ambassador reported back to the CIA and the State Department in early 2002 that the allegations were unequivocally wrong and based on forged documents.
Yes, that's what Christoph wrote, but the column was off.
As the Senate Intelligence Committee reported, the CIA did not find Wilson's oral report to unequivocally come down against Saddam Hussein trying to get uranium in Niger.
And Wilson could not have even known about the forged documents at the time that he made the report.
I think Wilson is a long-ago lefty.
He's a looney-tuned lefty.
I don't, I just think that this is a plat that was hatched.
She's at the weapons of mass destruction desk, if you will, at the CIA.
And the whole point of him was to send him over there and to come back with a report that would do anything it could to undermine Bush's war in Iraq and the effort to go there.
This is a political move, and these people have been caught.
They've been ensnared.
They asked for the fame, even though she's all upset that she's been exposed.
He's all upset she's been exposed, but they marvel in the fame.
They're drinking it all in, and they're worried now they're about to be exposed.
Hence their lawsuit.
And I suspect it'll be much like this carry operative lawsuit against the guys that get the documentary when it gets down to deposition time and it gets down to you know crunching the numbers time.
Something will happen and this thing will go away because they're very lucky right now that the drive-by media has chosen to overlook the facts of Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson and all this and instead prop them up as wronged, small, innocent little victims of the vicious Cheney and Bush.
Back after this, folks, stay with us.
Okay, lots of stuff to do here, folks, before we end the busy broadcast today.
For those of you who have been braced since the 1st of June, since hurricane season started, by the way, where have been all the hurricanes?
Expecting a horrible season this year, global warming.
Where have all the hurricanes been?
You know, by this time last year, there were five named storms already.
We were already at the E, A, B, C, D, E, five named storms.
Where have they been?
Well, we got one.
Well, we don't have a hurricane yet.
Tropical depression forms off the North Carolina coast.
The second tropical depression of this season formed off the North Carolina coast Tuesday.
Tropical Storm Watch issued for the eastern part of North Carolina.
Meteorologists said the depression could strengthen into a tropical storm as early as this evening.
Its top sustained wind speed late Tuesday morning was 35 miles per hour.
If it reached 39, the depression would become Tropical Storm Burl.
B-E-R-Y-L.
So a new crisis has evolved.
I did.
I said that I felt this was Carolina's turn.
Carolina and North on the eastern seaboard this year.
I did make that pretty.
And you know, I made that prediction right after they predicted whatever number of storms this year, 17 or 19.
I said, you know what?
I know as much as they do about this.
So here's my prediction.
We're going to have X number of hurricanes.
I forget what number I mentioned, but North Carolina is the target this year.
That's just what I think.
Based on my years in Florida of dodging these things, I have evolved my own scientific research and study of patterns.
If it's, well, if it hits New York, you're in big trouble.
This is going to have to be pretty powerful, but it will expose the inequality of economic circumstances in New York, no question about it.
Debbie Schlussel, well-known columnist babe out of Detroit, sends an interesting note.
You know, one of the controversies that's evolved over in Lebanon is the incompetent effort being mounted by the Bush administration to get Americans at risk in Lebanon out of there.
And this is a very interesting note from Debbie.
One thing lost in all the press coverage of the whining Americans who went to Lebanon of their own accord and now want us to pick up the tab to get them out.
The majority of Americans in Lebanon are Hezbollah supporters.
Most of them are Shiite Muslims, many of whom hold dual U.S. and Lebanese citizenship.
Many are anchor babies born here to Muslims in the U.S. illegally.
Some are illegal aliens who became citizens through rubber stamping citizenship and immigration services and its INS predecessor, coupled with political pressure by spineless politicians.
Of the 25,000 American citizens and green card holders in Lebanon, at least 7,000 are from Dearborn, Michigan, the heart of Islamic America, and especially Shia Islam.
These 7,000 are mostly Shiite Muslims who openly and strongly support Hezbollah, ditto for many of the rest of the 25,000 that are there.
Here is Andrew in Portland, Oregon.
I'm glad you waited, Andrew.
Welcome to the EIB network.
Rush, this idea of proportionality in regards to Israel's response is a crock.
Proportionality begets perpetuity.
Israel has got a bloody Hezbollah and Hamas's nose is so bad they never entertained a thought of going up against Israel again.
If my memory serves me correct, Israel crossed the Suez when they fought Egypt, didn't they?
Yeah.
And they haven't had any problems with Egypt.
They have not.
There have been six major wars.
I think the numbers escaped me, but Israel has cleaned clocks each and every time.
And in those instances, the vanquished have stayed vanquished.
It's now terrorist groups, not nations, that have sprung up.
Well, I gave you the statistics earlier, World War II.
We lost 92,000 people on the battlefield in the Pacific theater.
The Japanese lost over 1.5 million.
Someone says that disproportionate?
That's how you win.
It's absurd.
The whole thing is absurd.
Let's see.
Hope Sound, Florida.
This is Paul.
You're next.
Sir, great to have you with us.
Yes, Rush, thanks for having me on.
Yes.
I just wanted to comment on the conservative crackup that you mentioned earlier, especially involving George Will.
I've been a longtime admirer of George Will, but I think the problem with men like him and other intellectual conservatives is that they're allowing themselves to still view this Iraq situation as a nation-building exercise.
And as such, it would be a violation of core conservative principles.
But if we view it as I think it started out to be, which is national security issue, then I think it is firmly in the tradition of conservative principles.
But I think Bush allowed the media to box him into making this a nation-building exercise where we define success as elections and peace and stability and so on.
And I think he should stick with the idea of it being national security issue.
Well, I think Bush has tried to make that case constantly, but he does talk about the value of spreading freedom, that freedom is in every heart.
Let me come to George Will's defense about one thing.
And not that he needs it, by the way.
He's entirely capable of defending himself.
But there are two schools of thought in this Iraq business, and all of the war on terror.
And you'll find some so-called conservative intellectuals, and don't accuse me of being one either.
The last thing I never want to be accused of being a journalist, and I don't want to be accused of being an intellectual, because intellectuals are idiots.
They're smart, but they have no common sense.
They don't know the right things.
At any rate, one of the arguments being banded about is, what's more important?
Victory over there.
in the war on terror or building a democracy.
And the argument is, let's secure victory, okay?
Let's go over there and let's unleash our power and secure victory and then build the democracy and let freedom ring and all of that.
And I think George Will would happen to be in that camp, but I make a point of not being speaking for him.
I'm not really sure.
Just a guess.
Got a run.
Sit tight.
Back in a second.
Can't wait for tomorrow, folks.
The past two days are an indication tomorrow's going to be unbeatable.
Look forward to seeing you then and have a great Tuesday.
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