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Dec. 28, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:41
December 28, 2006, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24 7 Podcast.
All right, now y'all put yourselves in my position here.
Guest host sitting in behind the golden microphone.
The very last words the executive producer of the program says to me before the theme music starts is we'd really appreciate it if you could mention that Dr. Walter Williams will be guest hosting the program tomorrow.
The very last words.
What you can't wait?
Let's let the audience know that there's light at the end of the tunnel.
We're going to have a good guest host on at some point.
The very last words you give me.
In fairness, in fairness, he did do a little bit of pumping up of me.
I mentioned on yesterday's program that the Johnny Donovan intro that you just heard mentions that I'm an award-winning talk show host, whereas in fact, I haven't won any awards in years and years and years, mostly because I don't enter.
What awards can you even win if you do this?
I don't know.
I haven't entered in a ward competitions, and I was reminded that well, didn't you win a Marconi Award?
Said, yes, I did.
Wasn't it for some sort of regional Marconi?
No, it was a Marconi Award for the whole country.
It was not a regional award.
And then I said, besides, I think you're only allowed to win that once.
And I was told, well, no, as a matter of fact, Russia's won it three or four times.
Oh, okay, so now I'm put in my place too.
I get it, I know I'm not Rush.
Russia's won the Marconi Award several times.
You only won it once.
That's why you get to come in and be a guest host, and Dr. Walter Williams is going to be here tomorrow.
I am award-winning and I am here for better or for worse.
We have a news flash to open the program today, in fact, two of them.
Denver's apparently going to get hit with another snowstorm.
You should watch these cable channels prior to any kind of weather occurrence.
Denver may be hit with 18 inches.
Key word being May.
Those of you in Denver, when they say you may be hit with 18 inches, it means you'll probably be hit with less, but you may be hit with 18 inches.
And they've got anchors out there.
They're sending everyone out to Denver because Denver was hit hard before Christmas and the airport was snarled and air traffic all over the country got screwed up.
It's winter.
Denver's up in the mountains.
You know what?
It's going to snow in Denver all winter.
But this is to be dealt with as a major story, so we'll keep you updated if anything happens during the course of Russia's program today.
If snow is seen in Denver, you will be the first to know.
Second news flash, and this one is not exaggerated.
Letter by Hussein written after conviction urges Iraqis to renounce hatred.
Saddam is urging Iraqis to renounce hatred.
Now, shouldn't there be some limits as to who is allowed to renounce hatred?
Now I know renouncing hatred is a good thing.
I, in fact, personally renounce hatred.
But can we just allow anybody to renounce hatred?
There's got to be some qualifier here.
Let's set the number maybe at 100,000.
If you've ordered the slaughter of more than 100,000 people, you are not allowed to renounce hatred.
We can't just let anyone renounce hatred.
Saddam is renouncing hatred.
And this is being treated as a major he puts this letter out.
He's clearly remember how Clinton was looking for his legacy in the last six years of his presidency.
He kept trying to find that legacy and couldn't really get it.
Kept looking for the legacy.
Saddam is now in the legacy mode of his soon-to-be-ended tenure as a human being.
and Yes, that's right.
That's what Clinton did.
That was his legacy.
So Saddam is looking for the legacy, and he clearly has decided what his legacy is to be, and that is that he is to be a martyr.
So Saddam wants to be remembered in the end as the guy who urged Iraqis to renounce hatred.
The guy slaughtered 180,000 Kurds.
He used nerve gas on them.
Yet he's renouncing hatred, and we're supposed to take a story like that seriously.
It's like Alan Iverson renouncing tattoos.
There are probably other examples, but that's a good one.
It comes to mind.
See, he's got a lot of, he's a basketball player, he's got a lot of uh tattoos.
Now I'm going to revisit the Iraq story, particularly in light of the comments by Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon, who went on the Senate floor yesterday and expressed the frustration of a lot of Americans.
He said, you know, I felt so proud when I saw the Iraqis vote, they're holding up the fingers indicating they voted.
Felt so proud that we were bringing democracy to a part of the world that had never seen it before.
And now I'm just frustrated as can be.
Americans are being killed every day, the sectarian violence, there's no end in sight.
I think we need to get out.
That's what he's a Republican senator from Oregon.
He said that.
And we're going to revisit that topic here because I think people are forgetting about the whole reason we were there in the first place.
And that's why we can't forget about Saddam, and we can't allow a rewriting of the history of Saddam, and we can't characterize Saddam as something other than what he was.
Now, in a weird way, the same sort of thing is going on right now with former President Ford.
Watch the mainstream media coverage of the funeral of President Ford and the coverage that you've seen assessing Ford's presidency right now.
All of a sudden, according to the left, Jerry Ford wasn't that bad of a president.
They seem to all of a sudden now be okay with him.
Well, when did that happen?
I'm actually old enough to have been around when Ford was the president.
They vilified him.
They hated him.
They mocked him, they ridiculed him.
They did to him the same thing that they do to every single Republican leader we have, which is they portrayed him as a buffoon.
They portrayed Reagan as a buffoon, they portrayed the first Bush as a buffoon, and they pref and they portrayed W as a buffoon.
They do that to everyone.
They made Ford out to be an idiot.
Guy was third in his class at the Yale Law School, but he was supposedly in it.
But now the analysis of Ford is all different.
First of all, there's an interview in the Washington Post that Ford apparently did a couple of years ago with Bob Woodward, and it was to be embargoed until after his death.
The agreement that Woodward had with President Ford is that you can report on this, but only after I die.
And in the interview, President Ford apparently expressed grave doubts about the wisdom of the war with Iraq and felt that the rationalization for the war was a mistake, and the President Bush was making a major mistake in going to war in Iraq.
So of course, the story is now being widely trumpeted.
Even Jerry Ford was against the war with Iraq.
As if President Ford is now someone that should be looked upon as this very sage, wise individual.
When did they decide to put him in that category?
The same thing is happening with regard to their evaluation of President Ford's most remembered action.
Thirty days after President Ford became president, he pardoned Richard Nixon.
It was that decision that probably cost him a chance to be elected to a full term in 1976.
The opinion polls at the time were overwhelmingly negative as to that decision.
Ford was truly despised, vilified for the decision to pardon President Nixon.
He made the decision at the time because he felt as though the nation needed to move forward.
That the Watergate scandal had consumed the country.
President Nixon was now gone.
He was back in California in disgrace.
Rather than have the spectacle of a former president of the United States on criminal trial and potentially having an ex-president in prison, President Ford made the decision to simply put an end to it.
And he pardoned Nixon.
And it was a wildly unpopular decision.
But now, 30 years later, 32 years later, looking back at it, people are viewing it somewhat differently.
There's a remarkable quote that I was not aware of until today from Teddy Kennedy five years ago.
He was speaking at a ceremony in which President Ford was given a profile and courage award from one of the John F. Kennedy centers.
And Kennedy said the following quote, I was one of those who spoke out against his action then.
But time has a way of clarifying past events.
And now we see that President Ford was right.
Time has a way of clarifying past events.
Well, yeah, it does.
Maybe Teddy Kennedy should start clarifying a lot of other past events.
Like maybe it would have been a good idea to call the police after he drove into the pond with Mary Joe.
There are a lot of things that probably, if you look back at them now, seem to be more intelligent.
This is something history is always going to be kinder to conservatives than contemporary coverage at the time.
You know why that is?
Because we're usually right, and we are usually proven right by events that move forward.
President Reagan was ridiculed and ostracized for totally changing American policy toward the Soviet Union.
Rather than try to accommodate the Soviet Union, rather than continue detente, the engagement of the Soviets, he decided that he wanted to win the Cold War.
He was considered bellicose.
There were people who were afraid that he was saber-rattling, that he could bring about a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union.
History has proven Reagan's stance to be correct.
Reagan was ridiculed for the tax cuts of the early 80s.
They set in motion an economic recovery that really continued for 25 years.
And there's no real way of knowing, but you do have to wonder.
If 25 and 30 years from now, the Teddy Kennedys of the future will be saying, you know, it seemed to be a bad decision at the time, but George W. Bush was right to confront terrorism and take the fight to them.
He was right to take on Saddam Hussein.
He was right to confront Iran.
He was right to take an aggressive attitude toward Al-Qaeda.
The beauty of history is that we see how these things play out.
And history will always be a friend to conservatives.
And the revisionism that you now see toward Jerry Ford, I think is evidence of that.
He wasn't.
There are a lot of problems in his presidency.
But he inherited a remarkably different a difficult series of events that he had to deal with.
He had a very tough time.
And as we mourn his passing, which the nation now does, I do think we benefit from looking at that presidency in a proper context.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush.
1-800-282882 Is the telephone number at EIB.
My name is Mark Belling.
I'm sitting in for Rush.
Let's go to Binghamton and New York Binghamton, New York, and Rob.
Rob, it's your turn.
Yeah, I just heard you talking about uh what seemed like a gracious comment that Ted Kennedy made about uh about Gerald Ford and that that was met with discussion about Chappaquitic.
And I guess my question is this.
I hear Hannity talking about how we're supposed to fear Nancy Pelosi and fear Harry Reid and other than hate.
Well, take up your problems with him with him.
What is it that you're doing?
I can't even speak for Rush, much less anyone else.
What?
What?
Well, what other than hate and fear?
What do you guys bring to the discussion of real issues, serious issues in this country?
Now, my sh I've only been on for twenty minutes, and I'm only a fill-in, and already I'm accused now of bringing hate and fear.
What hate and fear have I brought?
I assume by the time the show is over that you lefties are going to have all sorts of hate and fear that's that came out of my mouth.
What hate and fear did I offer here?
I want to know what it is what it is that I have to apologize for.
I listened to you for two minutes and I got to hear about Chappaquittick after Ted Kennedy says that Gerald Ford made a good decision.
Rob, just to you, just for you, Rob.
I I I'm apologizing.
You're right.
I should never have taken that cheap shot against Senator Kennedy.
You are absolutely right.
And to anyone who is offended, I apologize.
And for any other shots that I take at any other Democrat or any other liberal over the next two hours and forty minutes, let me deeply apologize in advance.
Because we certainly know that no shots are ever taken at our side.
Why President Bush hasn't had any cheap shots directed at him at all.
It never happens.
And for me to dare suggest that in evaluating the record of Senator Kennedy, we might mention the death of a young woman.
I just terrible shot.
Yes, we've renouncing hatred anyway today.
Saddam has renounced hatred, and I suppose it's good that we conservatives renounce hatred.
We're always accused of hatred.
Whenever a conservative offers a comment on anything, it is hate.
When a liberal offers a comment on something, it is spirited commentary and criticism in the greatest uh respect for the free speech rights we have as Americans.
Killeen, Texas, and Mary Ann.
Mary Ann, it's your turn on Russia's program.
Good morning, Mark.
Hi.
I just wanted to say I would not be surprised.
Of course, the liberals are praising Jerry Ford.
He finally did the one thing that a conservative can do that they can prove approve of.
He died.
And as far as the liberal thing good conservative is a dead conservative.
And we saw a lot of the same thing after President Reagan passed away.
The other thing that liberals like about conservatives is when they lose.
They like the ones that lost.
And Gerald Ford, after all, lost the presidency.
He was decent enough to lose to Jimmy Carter, who they love.
So that is something that you know results in them praising him, so they think highly of him as a result of that.
You're you're right about that.
Thanks, Mary Ann.
With regard to President Ford, if you ask me, do I think he was a good president, I'd say the word good is probably too strong.
Was he a bad president?
I wouldn't say that either.
What he was was a unique president.
He came in without any concept of a mandate from the public.
He was appointed vice president upon the resignation of Spiro Agno.
He was never elected president.
He was never elected vice president, and he had to follow a president of his own party who resigned in scandal.
That's a hard way to come in.
And then, a few months later, they had the 1974 elections.
After the 74 elections, the Democrats held a majority in the House of Representatives of 145 seats.
It was the most lopsided the Congress has ever been in American history.
They had a 145 seat majority.
And here's Ford, a Republican who has to govern in the face of that.
Then, twice, people take shots at him.
He was the target of two separate assassination attempts.
Then, in the middle Of his presidency, he has to deal with a hostage situation.
I believe it was the Mayaguez that was taken captive off the coast of Cambodia.
He had to deal with that.
He had to consider whether or not we were going to wage an attack on Cambodia in an attempt to free the members of the Mayaguez.
He chose not to do that, and he got all of the guys back safely, as I recall.
He faced a very difficult presidency.
A lot of conservatives questioned whether or not he made a mistake in continuing the Nixon policy of Detente rather than more aggressively confronting the Soviet Union.
It probably given where he came from and the time that he was there.
It would have been too much to try to reverse a policy like that.
Others say he was the president that presided over the fall of South Vietnam.
Well, it was Congress, that overwhelmingly democratic Congress that cut off funding for that war.
So I think to evaluate Ford properly, you have to put into context the time at which he served and the very unique set of circumstances that he faced.
Following the lead of Saddam Hussein and the caller upset about my shot at Senator Kennedy, we are renouncing hatred today on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Don't know if this will continue tomorrow because Dr. Walter Williams will be here, something that I am being urged to remind the audience of.
There's a story out there, happened yesterday, that I think we have to talk about.
This one is going to touch a nerve with a lot of people, and I will admit it is touching a nerve with me.
Gordon Smith's a Republican senator from Oregon.
He went on the Senate floor yesterday and he raised serious questions about the war in Iraq.
Now it's going to the story's getting a lot of attention for obvious reasons.
The media loves it when someone says what members of the media themselves think.
So they're going to trumpet the story.
Even better that it's a Republican saying it.
So now they can say, even Republicans are loudly criticizing President Bush's policies and the war with Iraq.
The New York Times describes it for a solid Republican who had originally voted for the war.
The words spoken by the Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon on the evening of December 7th, which is when he delivered the speech were incendiary and marked a stunning break with the president.
I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day.
And that is absurd.
It may even be criminal.
But the real impact of the address came not just from Mr. Smith's words, but from the way he delivered them.
His somber cadence resonated in a way that made political Washington take notice, transforming him into one of the most talked about Republicans heading into the new Congress.
He said, Quote, I remember the pride I felt when the statue of Saddam Hussein came down.
I remember the thrill when three times Iraqis risked their own lives to vote democratically in a way that was internationally verifiable, as well as legitimate and important.
Now all those memories seem much like ashes to me.
Many things have been attributed to George Bush, Smith said, but I do not believe him to be a liar.
He is not guilty of perfidy, but I do believe he is guilty of believing bad intelligence and giving us the same.
I can't tell you how devastated I was to learn that in fact we were not going to find weapons of mass destruction.
I think where Smith is is where a lot of members of the United States, a lot of citizens of this country are.
They are frustrated with what's going on in Iraq.
They felt tremendous pride when our brilliant military came in and won the war in a week, took Baghdad with barely a shot being fired.
They felt tremendous pride when the statue of Saddam came tumbling down.
They felt tremendous pride when a provisional government was established, and they felt tremendous pride when you saw all of those Iraqis patiently standing in line to for the first time in their lives vote.
But now, Day after day after day after day after day, the story is exactly the same.
Sectarian violence in Iraq with American soldiers caught in the middle.
Sunnis killing Shiites, Shiites retaliating by killing Sunnis, terrorists who call themselves members of Al Qaeda shooting at American soldiers with no end seemingly in sight.
And I think a lot of people are exactly where Gordon Smith is with his comments.
So I'm not going to criticize what it is that he's saying because I think a lot of people feel exactly the same way, and I'm guessing a lot of you feel the same way.
And I'll even ask you, do you agree with him?
Do you agree with him?
Is he right?
Is it time to just throw up our hands and say, enough of it?
We're through with Iraq.
Is that the right thing for us to do, given how difficult and frustrating the situation is?
I'll put it out to you and I'll give you the phone number.
1-800-282-2882.
I'm partly where Gordon Smith is.
I too am frustrated by what's happening in Iraq.
I am a supporter of the war.
I think the war was the right thing to do.
I strongly endorse President Bush's decision to confront the Iraqis and take the war to the terrorists.
I do not think it was a mistake.
I do, however, believe that we have achieved our primary goals in Iraq.
As for what the goals are right now, I think they're very, very unclear.
I hear how they're stated, we're going to try to defend the Iraqi government until it is strong enough to defend itself, until it is able to control itself internally and deal with a terror threat that comes in from the outside.
I know that.
But how do you determine when that moment is?
Is the violence right now in Iraq too much?
Or not.
I think we've got to establish what the goal in Iraq is.
Otherwise, we're just going to sit there and sit there and sit there and sit there and sit there.
And I am not calling for a withdrawal.
And I want to make it clear I'm speaking only for myself right now, not for Russia for anyone else.
I'm not calling for a withdrawal.
But it is frustrating to see what's happening in Iraq right now.
What more can we do?
We've given them a country.
This is a nation that was ruled by a brutal dictator, and they know that.
There are almost no Iraqis in mourning because Saddam is going to be executed.
We got rid of an evil person who was treating his own people terribly.
We then took them by the hand and walked them to the altar of democracy.
We showed them how to draft a constitution.
We provided protection for their provisional government.
We kept their economy going.
We kept the infrastructure going.
We've stood by with our own soldiers putting their lives on the line to allow that nation a chance to exist.
Yet our men and women are being killed, and the violence over there is continuing.
You do wonder whether or not it's hopeless.
And I am not endorsing the Iraq surrender group's recommendations.
And I'm not saying that our sole goal in Iraq ought to be to figure out how to get out.
Nor am I suggesting that American policy has to be determined on whether or not there are American casualties.
What I am saying is that it is very, very difficult.
It is very, very difficult to take a look at a country over there in which Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds can't deal with one another, and United States soldiers being caught in the crossfire.
On the other hand, and there is another hand here.
This isn't easy.
This is a very difficult thing.
The fact that it is hard doesn't mean that we can't try to do it, or that we don't have an obligation to try to do it.
It would be nice and wonderful.
Okay, we knocked off Saddam, had elections, now we're gonna leave and everybody in Iraq lives happily ever after.
It's never going to work that way.
The question becomes when is enough enough?
And I'm not sure anybody has the answer.
If President Bush has failed at all with regard to the war in Iraq, it's that he hasn't articulated what the answer is and what the criteria is.
To Robert in Detroit, you're on Russia's program with Mark Belling.
Hi, good morning.
Uh or good day, anyway.
Um original uh comment was that everybody attacks George Bush because he made what they call now a unilateral decision to go to war when he had clear authorization both the ninety nineteen ninety-eight resolution to remove Saddam from power and the additional resolution to look for the weapons of mass destruction, which I do understand they did find some left over from the eighties.
They found a few.
They found a few, but the fact of the matter is they didn't find what most of us thought they would find, including myself.
They didn't find the best one.
That's beside the point.
We're there.
It is incumbent upon us to finish the job we start.
And anybody who thinks that we can't win isn't paying attention to the actual uh history of this country.
We had pacified all of South Vietnam by 1971 or 72.
What was the you know, how do you how do you determine what winning is, though, Robert?
What is winning?
Winning is when one side or the other says, I give up.
To me, do you think that the Sunnis and the Shiites are ever going to be able to say that to one another?
Or is this the Israelis and the Palestinians all over again?
I'm not worried about the Sunnis and the Shiites.
They'll eventually come to a to come to a point where one of them or the other is going to have to sit down with the other side and say, hey, let's figure out how to do that.
One one would hope, but so far that hasn't happened.
The thing that frustrates me about Iraq is that we have accomplished every goal we could possibly set out.
We have done our part in Iraq.
The problem in Iraq right now is a Iraqis and B terrorists coming in from other countries like Iran.
And I do think a lot of this is being manipulated by Iran, but Iran's manipulation wouldn't have any success if Iraq itself was more under control.
And you can escalate and send in more troops, but there isn't a way to stop Iraqis from despising one another because they belong to different sects of the same religion.
That's the part that is very, very frustrating.
The answer isn't to cut and run.
There are a lot of benefits for our being in Iraq, including the fact that we're right next door to Iran and can keep an eye on them.
It doesn't mean, though, that Americans who are disturbed that our soldiers are paying a very heavy price for the inability of that country to get its act together, that they're wrong and having that frustration.
That's the point that I'm trying to make here.
Thanks, Robert.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Uh President Bush is holding meetings today on exactly what we're talking about here.
What is the Iraq strategy from this point forward?
I believe the Iraq strategy has essentially worked right up to the point of having elections and putting in place a new government.
The problem is the situation right now in dealing with this violence that keeps going on within the nation, especially around Baghdad.
To argue that we should not have intervened in the first place because there's strife now, I think is absurd and it forgets Saddam.
And if his execution serves anything, it's going to remind people of exactly who was ruling Iraq and what the conditions were like in Iraq before we intervened in the first place.
And we can't forget about that.
But deciding how we're going to go forward and what the criteria is going to be is essential.
To simply say we're going to be there until everything is okay isn't acceptable to me because I don't know what okay means.
And I also don't know whether or not Iraq is ever going to be okay.
But that's not because of us.
Sydney, Ohio, and John.
John, it's your turn on EIB.
I just have frustration with the Americans' short attention span.
We have to finish the job.
It's not get in, get out.
We we've had uh roughly 3,000 uh killed in Iraq.
And when we look at history, that is a very small number.
Nobody wants anybody to die, but that is such a minuscule number compared to wars in the past.
You're right about that.
You're also right about the short attention span.
That's why we loved the early stages of the war on Iraq.
I mean, there was a route.
We steamrolled through that country.
We came in, very few American soldiers died, Saddam went into hiding, his statue was toppled, a provisional government was put in place.
That was, in retrospect, the easy part.
This is the hard part.
On the other hand, don't you have some concern that even if we do everything right, that the violence over there is going to continue.
I have that concern, don't you?
I do.
I believe the violence will always continue over there.
But uh, this is going to be a long-term war.
There is when it comes to the Muslims and the Christians in this world, that's the war.
That's the long-term war.
Well, but that war that what what you're talking about there, the confrontation of the Islamist movement that wants jihad is beyond just the situation in Iraq.
I believe that we have accomplished most of our goals in Iraq.
And while Iraq might now resemble what Lebanon was 20 years ago, it is still not a threat to the rest of the region, and it is not a threat to the United States as it was before.
And the ultimate evil, Saddam has been eliminated.
Iran is a bigger problem.
The terrorist movement and the Islamist movement of jihad is a bigger problem.
And I would hate to see us not willing to confront the problem that we're facing with Iran because the American public still has the heebie jeebies with regard to Iraq.
There is a point at which we have to walk away from this attempt to constantly prop up the Iraqi government, and the Iraqi government is going to have to walk on its own.
That point is going to come, and I don't think that we can say we're going to be there for five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, and accept a nation that will not take responsibility for its own actions.
We're now getting stories that indicate that a number of members of the Iraqi police force have loyalties to either the Sunni militias or the Shiite militias.
And they're unwilling to crack down on members of their own religious sect.
Well, how can you deal with something like that?
The fact that it's occurring, though, is not a condemnation of the decision to begin the war in the first place.
Because whatever you think about the current situation in Iraq, it's a lot better than it was when Saddam Hussein was killing hundreds of thousands of his own people and threatening the entire region.
Thank you for the call, John.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush on EIB.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Tallahassee, Florida, Dick, it's your turn on EIB.
Thanks for taking the call, Mark.
I'm just very concerned that we're going to get out of there too quick.
We made that mistake in Vietnam.
We were about to win it, and we backed out.
And now we're sending signals to the people over there to the Sunnis that uh we're gonna back out again.
I think that's a terrible mistake.
I agree with you on that.
Without regard to what we do in Iraq, The worst thing we can do is turn a victory into a defeat.
We can't do that.
We can't allow the terrorist world to believe that all you have to do is kill a few Americans and America will cut and run and run away.
This is how you beat them.
We can't do that.
The strategy, though, to figure out exactly what is an acceptable outcome in Iraq is something that's much harder.
And I'm not saying that there's easy answers here.
What I do believe that President Bush has to do is come up with some sort of way of defining what is stability in Iraq, because calling for a total end of the violence is naive.
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