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March 28, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:13
March 28, 2007, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Well, the president was on fire today, did exactly what I hoped he would do.
The only thing he didn't do was do it in prime time.
But he did it.
Fired both barrels at the Democrats today in the House and the Senate.
You know, I was reading a bunch of news stories last night.
Nobody expected this to pass in the Senate.
I don't know how they can say that.
The plan was for it to pass.
But it was close.
Cheney was sitting in there waiting to break the tie.
But uh Dingy Harry went out and he convinced uh the two senators from Nebraska, Ben Nelson and what's his name?
What's it Hagel to uh change their minds on uh troop withdrawal date, something they had uh previously opposed just weeks ago.
Greetings, friends.
Welcome.
It's the EIB Network, this the Rush Limbaugh program on Hump Day, the middle of the week.
We're here with three big hours of broadcast excellence.
Telephone number.
You want to be in the program today, 800-282-288-2 and the uh email address rush at EIB net.com.
So the Democrats in both the House and the Senate now have made me a profit.
They own defeat.
That's what the House passed.
The Senate passed it yesterday.
It is a bill for defeat.
The President responded today very forcefully.
We have three sound bites coming up here in mere moments.
But first, I want to go through some of this uh with you.
Uh the Democrat majority in Congress, to anybody paying attention, has made it abundantly obviously clear they are for defeat.
And they're doing this under the guise that the November elections had meaning, and that this is what the American people want.
I haven't been able to find this uh on the wires yet, but uh a couple of the cable networks reporting today that there's a ten percent uptick in a poll of the American people in terms of how Iraq is going.
A ten percent increase in the in the percentage of people that think that it's improving and uh has gotten better.
So you remember the uh the old days back in November.
Uh or you don't have to go back that far, go back last month.
Uh and the subject of timetables and withdrawing from uh Iraq was discussed.
And last September, candidate Jim Webb said this.
Anyone who tells you we can set a timetable for withdrawal doesn't understand war.
And anybody who says that nothing can be done to speed a secure peace doesn't understand America.
On March the 8th, 20 days ago, Senator Ben Nelson, Nebraska.
I'm bothered by dates.
I think you still have to go on conditions for staying.
Dingy Harry got to him yesterday.
He changed his mind.
On March the twelfth, Indiana Senator Evan Bye wrote the following.
I, for example, am not in support of circling a date on a calendar and saying no matter what, we're out on that date.
But he changed his mind with pressure being brought to bear by Dingy Harry.
Dingy Harry went to these guys and said, hey, the elections in November meant something.
Besides, we got to be concerned about our poll numbers at Moveon.org.
Nancy Pelosi, 28 billion dollars, taxpayer dollars in one week to round up the bare minimum of 218 votes that she needed, the exact minimum to get her majority.
It works out to 130 million dollars or so per vote.
You want to hear some of the president details some of this, but I've got the laundry list of things, the pork that is in the bill that the Senate passed yesterday.
As we all know, there's 25 million dollars for a spinach farmer, 24 million dollars for funding for sugar beets, three million dollars funding for sugar cane going to one Hawaiian co-op.
There's 20 million dollars for insect infestation damage reimbursements in Nevada, Idaho, and Utah, 2.1 billion dollars for crop production losses, one and a half billion for livestock production losses, 100 million dollars for dairy production losses, $13 million for U lamb replacement and retention, $32 million for the livestock indemnity program, $40 million for the tree assistance program.
Speaking of the the tree assistance program, it's gonna really need some help now.
In San Francisco, have you heard about this?
They're banning the plastic bags at the grocery stores.
Now, do you remember why they put those plastic bags into grocery stores in the first place?
Anybody got an idea?
Quick.
To save the trees.
Exactly right.
To save the tree as a renewable resource.
We had to get rid of the paper bags, had to go to plastic bags.
Now we got to get rid of the plastic bags because they cause pollution and they are made from the petroleum industry.
And I'll get I'll guarantee you the next plastic bag is going to be these compact fluorescent bulbs.
Already scientists are starting to get concerned at all the mercury in these babes.
And pretty soon, oh, everybody's going to go out and buy these little curly cued compact fluorescence.
And not long down the line, somebody's going to say, you know what?
This is an environmental disaster waiting to happen.
So the compact fluorescent is going to be the next plastic bag in a grocery store.
Mark my words.
There's a hundred million dollars for small agricultural dependent businesses.
Look at how much a pork is in this bill for farming and agriculture related industries.
Six million dollars for North Dakota flooded cropland.
$35 million for emergency conservation programs.
This is in the bill that the Democrats in the House and Senate passed uh yesterday to uh pull troops out of Iraq in March 2008 and not fund uh the surge.
One hundred and fifteen million dollars for the conservation security program.
Now, yes, it sounds like a dupe, but it's not.
It was earlier $35 million for the emergency conservation program, and then another $115 million for the conservation security program, which proves much of what I have said constantly, the redundancy in all these federal programs is uh uh well it's it's pathetic.
There's eighteen million dollars for drought assistance in the upper Great Plains and in the Southwest.
No, wait a second.
We just had a flood uh we just had infestation, insect infestation, uh livestock indemnity.
Oh, yeah, six million dollars for the North Dakota flooded cropland, and uh $18 million for drought assistance in the upper Great Plains in the Southwest.
Provision that extends the availability by a year, three and a half million dollars in funding for guided tours of the Capitol is in this bill.
Also a provision that allows transfer of funds from holiday ornament sales in the Senate gift shop.
$165.9 million dollars for fisheries disaster relief funded through NOAA.
This includes $60.4 million for salmon fisheries in the Klamath Basin region.
$12 million for forest service money.
There's $425 million for education grants for rural areas.
This is the Secure Rural Schools program, $640 million for something called LIHEAP, LIHEAP, have no clue what it is, $25 million for asbestos abatement at the Capitol Power Plant, $388.9 million for funding for backlog of old Department of Transportation projects,
$22.8 million for geothermal research and development, $500 million for wildfire fire management, $13 million for mine safety technology research, $31 million for one month extension of the milk income loss contract program.
Have I lost the audience yet, do you think?
Low-income energy assistance is what LIHEAP is.
Let me spin it again.
Uh let's see.
Okay, what was that number on the heap?
Let me find it.
Guess this list is uh six hundred and forty million for low-income heating assistance.
I thought Caesar Chavez or Hugo Chavez taking care of that.
Winter is over.
Let's see.
Uh $50 million for fisheries disaster mitigation fund, $100 million for security at the presidential candidate nominating conventions, and $2 million for the University of Vermont.
Plus uh $6.4 million.
I get this, $6.4 million for the House of Representatives' salaries and expenses account.
And uh President Bush, I don't even know what that is.
So all of this, you you you tell me, folks, we don't have all the money in the world to run five wars at the same time.
This is absolutely absurd.
This is what's in the bill, the Democrats' own defeat bill uh that was passed yesterday in the Senate that the president has promised he's uh going to veto.
Now, this was the strategy all along.
The president wanted to get this thing passed as soon as possible so that uh he could veto it and then and then get going on the butt dingy Harry said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, wait a minute.
I uh we're not in no hurry here.
Uh Dingy Harry wants to delay the conference on this, the Senate and House Fifth to get together, come up with the reconciliation of their two different bills, although they're pretty similar.
Uh Dingy Harry wants to put that off, I think, until after the Easter recess.
The money's needed by April 15th.
And uh the signal this sends to our enemies uh is loud and clear.
So here is your Democrat Party in action in front of the world for everyone to see.
They have signed on to defunding the troops.
They have signed on to defeat and pulling us out of Iraq on March 31st, of 2008, which will secure victory for the uh insurgency and uh the amalgamation of enemies currently in Iraq.
We'll come back, let's hear what the president had to say about this in just a moment.
I can't help but think back to the campaign last September, last October.
All the angry calls I got from Republicans.
We got to get the Republicans out of earmarks.
All these earmarks, all these spending, they're spending us blind.
That's not what we sent them to do.
So we sent the Republicans out.
Now we've got we've got we've got pork uh pork at sizzling.
Uh, we've got all kinds of pork.
But here's the thing about this.
Hang on, folks.
I got static all over my line here, knowing it fixes his banging the disc.
Now, one thing about Democrats is everybody expects them to spend.
So I wonder if you Republicans and independents who abandoned the Republican Party last November will take out similar anger uh the next chance you have at the ballot box against the Democrats who are outspending Republicans and they're adding massive ticks and tax increases.
I haven't gotten into the tax increases in this get out of a rock bill.
In fact, this bill needs to be titled something uh entirely different, the Defeat in the War on Terror Bill, authored by the Democrats.
That's really what this bill is.
And it's going to be fascinating to see this unfold.
Even though the president wants to veto this and set up a showdown, the Democrats have passed into law in both houses a certain deadline, March 31, 2008, to get out of there.
Now, how are they going to compromise on this?
You know, the troops are going to have to have money even to get out.
This doesn't authorize any of that.
There's still, I mean, we if the money is going to run out, the commanders say by April 15th.
This attorney Secretary of Defense says, Robert Gates, even if you pull out of there, it's not going to happen overnight.
It's going to require funds to do it.
I think the Democrats probably author that, but how do you compromise now on this pull-out date?
This is why I've been telling you over and over again that whether it's 210 or 212 or 2.8 or whenever they are sowing the seeds of an eventual landslide defeat for their party.
This they don't even see.
They think that they're returning today as a valor and history and tremendous success as they attempt to recreate the circumstances that were um in existence in the period of the Vietnam War.
Let's listen to the president here.
He was uh speaking to the National Cattleman's Beef Association today in Washington.
We have three sound bites.
Here's number one.
I want to read something to Army Sergeant Major Chris Nadeau says.
Guys on the second tour in Iraq.
He says, I'm not a Democrat or a Republican.
I'm a soldier.
The facts are the facts.
Things are getting better.
We're picking up momentum.
These are hopeful signs, and that's positive.
Yet at the very moment that General Petraeus' strategy is beginning to show signs of success.
The Democrats in the House of Representatives have passed an emergency war spending bill that undercuts him and the troops under his command.
The House bill becomes lower enemies in Iraq will simply have to mark their calendars.
They spend a month ahead plotting how to use their new safe havens once we were to leave.
It makes no sense for politicians in Washington, D.C. to be dictating arbitrary timelines for our military commanders in a war zone 6,000 miles away.
He was reading a uh note from Army Sergeant Major Chris Nando.
Now Here's something else.
The President mentioned General Petraeus.
General Petraeus was confirmed unanimously by the Senate to go head the surge.
And now he's just been defunded, essentially, for all intents and purposes by this vote in the House and in the Senate.
Here's the President hammering the Democrats on the pork in the bill.
The bill includes $74 million for peanut storage.
$25 million for spinach growers.
These may be emergencies, they may be problems, but they can be addressed in the normal course of business.
They don't need to be added on to a bill that's supporting our troops.
There's $6.4 million for the House of Representatives' salaries and expenses account.
I don't know what that is.
But it is not related to the war and protecting the United States of America.
Yeah, remember here are the numbers.
This is 24 to 25 billion dollars of pork in this bill.
That's the price Pelosi had to pay in order to get the bare minimum of 218 votes in the House for passage, which comes out to uh what did I calculate it to be a hundred and thirty million dollars of vote is about what it cost for her majority, her slim and the bare essential number she got was 218, and that's the minimum you need to win.
Uh and it cost 24 billion, 25 billion dollars.
And that's that's uh the this the Democrats have named their price for defeat now, and they're taking advantage of uh of the opportunity here to be in the majority, just you know, put all this pork in it.
I just again uh I want to say to all of you who were just fit to be tied over what the Republicans were doing last November thinking you were going to get a change, you got worse.
I'll be interesting to see if uh if there's any interest to hold Democrats accountable in uh in November of 2008.
Here's the bottom line.
This is the president uh promising the veto.
Here's the bottom line.
The House and Senate bills have too much pork, too many conditions on our commanders and an artificial timetable for withdrawal.
And I have made it clear for weeks.
If either version comes to my desk, I'm going to veto it.
If Congress fails to pass a bill to fund our troops on the front lines, the American people will know who to hold responsible.
Yes, they will.
Yes, they will.
The drive-by media will do their best to uh camouflage all that's happened here because it's not going to be something helpful to the Democrats.
They're feeling their oats right now.
Here's uh here's Nancy Pelosi this afternoon spoke to the press uh after the Senate vote and all the hubbub after the president's speech this morning.
Calm down with the threats.
There's a new Congress in town.
We respect your constitutional role.
We want you to respect ours.
This war must end.
The American people have lost faith in the president's conduct of the war.
Let's see how we can work together.
Well, there's uh not a whole lot of meeting grounds.
This is this is a great, great, great example of compromising in order to get along.
The Democrats, 25 billion dollars of pork to secure a bill that promises and and and requires the re uh removal uh and the retreat of troops, March 31st, 2008.
The president says, nope, I need another hundred billion dollars for the troops to stay and for the surge.
Now, where do you compromise on this, folks?
Where do you work together?
Now, if you're one of these newfangled Republicans that thinks that you have to get along with the opposition in order to serve the American people and make the American people happy, does anybody think it's going to be the Democrats compromising here?
At least right off the bat.
How are they going to compromise this?
They've got a date certain to get out, and it's passed into law now, March 31st, 2008.
How do they compromise?
Well, I mean, there are areas they could.
They could move the date, say, to April 4th, 2008.
They could move a hood.
But but the point is they're feeling their oats that they think that they have done what the American people want done.
And if they compromise At all on this, they've got problems.
They've got political problems.
Where does the president compromise on this?
All of you people who think compromise ought to happen in Washington.
You tell me where the middle ground is here, because on one side, there's defeat.
And on the other side, there's the chance for victory.
Now, where is there common ground there?
Somebody explained this to me.
And I all of you, and I don't know how many of you are in this audience, but I know there's a kitten caboodle of uh linguini-spined wimp people in this country who death might get along.
Mr. Limbaugh, we must compromise.
We must work together.
We must solve this problem.
Well, how do you solve this one?
I want to know what the compromise is here.
This is there isn't going to be any compromise here.
One side's gonna win and one side's going to lose.
And that's gonna be fascinating to watch to see how this plays out.
And that's going to involve this campaign's gonna be marshaling the support of the American people.
See who can pull this off.
We'll be back, and we will continue here in just a second.
Stern it up, turn it up.
I said turn it up.
You need a lot of decibels out there, folks.
Don't want to miss any syllables uttered by me, lovable fuzzball, well-known radio raccontour.
Rush Limbaugh.
Let's now listen to some of the enlightened uh debate.
That took place on the Senate floor yesterday prior to this stupid, idiotic, and uh uh defining vote.
We'll start here with uh Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.
Mr. President, we have misunderstood, misread, misplanned, and mismanaged our honorable intentions in Iraq with an arrogant self-delusion reminiscent of Vietnam.
Oh, spare me.
America finds itself now in a dangerous and isolated position in the world.
We are perceived as a nation at war with Muslims.
You idiot.
This debilitating and dangerous perception must be reversed as the world seeks a new center of gravity for this new century.
You, sir, are I'm going to refrain from name-calling.
We are perceived.
We are perceived as a nation at war with Muslims.
Senator, you are an elected senator.
You are one of 100 special people in the world's greatest deliberative body.
It is Muslims who are at war with us.
Does 9-11 exist in your memory bank, sir?
What did we do to cause this?
I want Senator Hagel to explain this.
What in the world do we do to cause it?
He must have the view that we're at war with Muslims.
We must have attacked them at some point.
The problem is we didn't defend ourselves against their attacks for 20 years.
And now all of a sudden we are, and we are where we've got senators in the United States in the Republican Party who are concerned.
The world thinks that we are at war with Muslims, and so the only way to make the world love us is to surrender and give up.
It was just a few short weeks ago that this very Senator, Chuck Hagel, uh rejected any concept of a timeline for withdrawal.
By the way, uh we're going to start a new game on this program, and I'm going to include Senator Hagel in this game.
It's called Let's Play Guess the Religion.
Two stories.
Story out of France.
There were riots on a French subway yesterday by youths.
Youths rioted.
What youths?
Who, besides militant Muslims, is rioting in France?
So let's play guess the religion.
Here's another story.
Students held hostage in Philippines.
Gunmen who say they have grenades seize group near Manila's City Hall.
Gunmen demanding improved housing for children seized a busload of daycare students and teachers Wednesday as police surrounded the stalled vehicle in downtown Manila.
Hostage takers scribbled in large letters on a sheet of paper taped to the bus windshield.
They were holding 32 children and two teachers were armed with two grenades, an assault rifle and a pistol.
They said they were demanding improved housing and education for 145 children in a daycare center where the incident appeared to have begun.
It'd be hard to house kids when they've been blown up.
I mean, you have to admit that.
So I wonder what religion these people are.
Guess the religion of these gunmen in the Philippines.
The Philippines are hotbed for Islamo fascism uh as as well as much of that region of the world.
And yet here is the brilliant Senator Hagel suggesting that uh we are perceived as a nation at war with Muslims.
I'm gonna tell you something, folks.
You go through life governing your own life on the basis of what you think others think of you, and you are a failure.
And you will annount to nothing but a heel of beans.
And who wants a hill of beans?
You will be nothing if your whole life is devoted to trying to be everything somebody you respect wants you to be.
Somebody you don't even know wants you to be.
In this case, Senator Hagel is concerned about a bunch of small fry countries who depend on us for much of what they have and much of their progress.
He's concerned what they think of us.
He's concerned what they think of him.
This is a recipe for disaster.
It's a recipe for failure.
In individual terms, it's a best guaranteed way to make sure you never amount to who you really are.
Because you're going to spend your whole life trying to meet the expectations of others, make others happy, make others uh uh not angry, uh not offend them or whatever.
This is embarrassing that somebody who apparently is uh of has this degree of intelligence to be elected to the United States Senate has this kind of an outlook and worldview.
Up next, Dingy Harry, late yesterday on the Senate floor.
Mr. President, this war is not worth the spilling of another drop of American blood.
As it stands, this emergency legislation before this body tonight will send a signal to our president that it's time for a new direction.
I heard the president Dingy Harry.
I don't think he got that message.
I don't think he thinks it's time for a new direction.
I think he thinks that uh you people own defeat.
I think he thinks that you Democrats are trying to secure defeat for your own country.
You are trying to guarantee we lose this war.
He knows that you probably don't care about that.
He knows all you want is him.
You heard this Democrats have gone out and hired a whole bunch of outside law firms to handle all the investigations of this administration that they have planned because their own counsel inside House committees is not going to be enough.
They're going to spend uh what did I read I'm gonna have to find the 225.
Well, I 225,000 to go out there and if th each lawyer is gonna cost them 225,000.
You ever paid legal fees?
You go out and fire these or hire these top dog lawyers from these big-time law firms, they're gonna come in there and work for government salaries.
They're gonna charge what they take.
225,000 is what they say, yeah, right.
That's like we're only gonna spend five bucks for the spinach farmer.
It ends up being twenty-four million for the spinach farmer out in Carmel, California.
At any rate.
Uh Dingy Harry letting the world know and letting our enemies know he's on their side.
The biggest allies that Al Qaeda has are the Democrats in the United States House, the Democrats of the United States Senate, and the poor, deranged, misguided leftists and Democrats, average citizens in this country.
Now, McCain, uh, on the Senate floor yesterday with a bit of a limbo echo here.
Supporters of this provision say they want a date certain for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.
But what they have offered us is more accurately described as a date certain for surrender.
A date certain for surrender, with grave consequences for the future of Iraq, the stability of the Middle East, and the security of Americans at home and abroad.
Yeah, and these are the people who don't forget that uh say they care about human rights and so forth.
They couldn't care less about the people of Iraq.
They couldn't care what the people of Iraq are going through then or now or in the future.
This is all about their political future, and their calculation is that this action in the House and Senate has launched them to the White House in 2008 in a perpetual majority.
That's what they think they've accomplished.
They are giddy.
They're very happy.
They love it when this country loses.
They love defeat.
They love the United States surrendering.
You know, not even the two senators from Maine, Olympia Snow and Susan Collins changed their votes on this.
They stuck with the rib.
Not even those two.
If you expect two to, you know, infiltrate the other side, you expect those two to be among the lists, but it's Chuck Hagel and uh Ben Nelson, who's a Democrat anyway, but they both they both changed their minds.
Here's more McCain, he was on the today's show this morning.
Meredith Vieira said, Your thoughts this morning, Senator McCain.
Fifty of my colleagues made a very bad decision yesterday, and uh I I believe that there's no doubt that uh the president, who is the commander in chief, we will prevail.
They we will fund the uh whatever is necessary for these uh great brave Americans who are fighting in Iraq to succeed.
Senator Reed said it's not worth one more drop of American blood.
If that's true, then why doesn't Senator Reed and the Democrats uh propose cutting off funding and bring them home tomorrow?
Why wait 18 months?
Well, I uh there that's a good question, but I'll tell you why they want 08.
They want it done before the election.
They want the withdrawal taking place in the election year during the presidential campaign.
And that's he's it's actually raised a very good point.
They say they're concerned about the troops.
Not one more drop of American blood should be lost.
Oh, we can lose a lot of Americans, we can lose a lot of blood, but we don't want this to happen till 2008 because these troops and their withdrawal are nothing but a pawn for our political ambitions.
That's what the Democrats are saying.
And they said it loud and clear.
Senator Durbin yesterday on the Senator floor.
We have spent $500 billion of our treasure in Iraq that could have been spent in the United States for the betterment of our people in our country.
We have given to the Iraqi people more than any other nation could ask for in the world.
We have stood behind them, we have deposed their dictator, we've given them free governance, we've given them a chance at a constitution and free elections, and now it's time for us to make it clear to the Iraqis it is their country, it is their war, it is their future.
That's the plan!
That's what the surge is all about, you dingbat.
That's precisely what the plan is.
By the way, uh has he ever heard of the Marshall Plan?
We spent more in Iraq.
What do we do for Germany?
What do we do for France?
What did we do for the UK?
What did we do for Japan?
This is pure idiocy.
And it's owned by the Democrat Party, just as they own surrender and just as they own defeat.
Hi, welcome back, Rush Limbaugh.
Half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.
We'll get to your phone calls here in just a brief minute, but I want to give you an idea of some of the other things coming up on the program today.
Great, great piece by uh a woman named Paula Spencer, who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who after this piece will be run out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, by the way.
And it's uh it's in Newsweek.
Uh, founded on a PMS NBC website.
We protect kids from everything but fear.
Uh that headline is sort of misleading.
Uh uh, she's she's really concerned about all of the fear that we are inculcating in our young children.
Uh you'll want to hear this.
Of course, we'll give details on the San Francisco City Council or whatever it is, ban of plastic bags and grocery stores.
Remember, those plastic bags were there to save the trees.
Now the trees, I guess don't matter.
We've got to get rid of the plastic bags.
Scientists worry about uh the mercury in energy saving compact fluorescence.
That'll be the next plastic bag down the road.
It's gonna be the next oat brand muffin.
Oat brand muffin's supposed to do all this great stuff, supposed to clean you out, make sure that you stay healthy and so forth.
Then they found out it didn't mean diddly squat.
As they've said this about coffee, who knows whatever number of things.
But compact fluorescence, those of you that have them and buy them and sell them.
I'm sorry to tell you this, but it won't be long down the road before we're gonna have to be very careful about these.
We might have to ban them because they just is too much mercury.
It's a it's environmental uh disaster.
Uh you know, Canute, the polar bear over there, little polar bear cub in the in the in the uh what is it, the Berlin Zoo.
Well, I had an accident over there yesterday.
This guy, this this polar bear has drawn more visitors than zoos ever had.
And had so many they couldn't fit them all into where Canute is.
So uh some of them went over there to the panda cage as a 22-year-old panda in there, and the panda died.
Uh just not used to fame.
Uh Panda just not not uh all that fame, all that attention.
Uh you know, just you wish this would happen.
Well, never mind.
The point is that they're now blaming Knut for this, that he is um uh he No, he's not a disruption that that he has uh he's he's played a partial role in the death of a panda.
That's what they're saying here.
It's from uh it's from Der Spiegel online, and then there's a blog about this uh on the UK Guardian, that he was partly responsible for the death of the panda because he's so popular he sent these people who couldn't see him over to see the panda de panda said, What's this and died?
Panda died.
Uh that's what they said.
Panda died because people are looking at it.
In fact, if you read the story, you're really not sure why the panda died, and you're really not sure what this little polar bear has anything to do with it, but story's still out there.
Uh at any rate, let's go to the phones.
David in Stanfield, North Carolina, you're up first.
It's great to have you on the EIB network.
How are you doing, Ross?
Good.
Thank you, sir.
Listen, I I'm about fit to be tied here.
Yesterday I heard Senator Reed on C-SPAN mentioned that the Iraqi Prime Prime Minister asked President Bush to remove the troops from Baghdad.
And that the majority of the Iraqi people wanted us out of Baghdad.
What is going on?
What is the truth?
I am so tired of it.
You know, that's something that Jack Mirtha has been spouting for a couple of years, that there are polls showing the Iraqi people want us out of there.
It's the exact opposite.
Uh the Iraqi people do not want us to leave yet.
They're very happy.
I had a picture the other day.
We put it on my website.
It's up there from a couple, I forget what day it was.
Might be Monday, but uh the Iraqis are coming back to Baghdad now that the surge is working, and they're having carnivals.
You can see pictures of them eating uh their versions of snow cones and riding on Ferris wheels and so forth.
As for Maliki, uh, yeah, he's gone back and forth, but eventually he wants us out of there.
There's no question.
But right now, no.
It's just the uh we're the ones telling Maliki the way it's gonna be.
We're the ones telling him what he's got to do in order to get control of his country, and that is join forces with us against his own buddies who are the Sunnis.
Well, what if this sovereign government, this is supposed to be a sovereign government, they don't want us there.
Why why are we there?
I'm I'm all for uh taking care of the situation.
It's very complicated, but it makes it even worse when you got the prime minister who can't get his act together.
I I just I'm just really fit to be taught.
I've got so many so many thoughts about this whole thing, but you don't have time to hear it.
So I just I'm not sure.
Well, let me try to explain look.
I know what your your your menagerie of thoughts are.
Uh but there's there are many things at work here, and don't forget Iraq, this whole thing is not just about the stability of Iraq.
If you think it is, we would have never gone to war just for the stability of Iraq.
This is about United States national security.
This is about protecting us.
This president said today um don't let the images of 9-11 in your mind die.
It's amazing that so many people have forgotten it.
I know why it is.
It's easy to forget it.
There hadn't been an attack since.
And Bush is so rotten there hadn't been an attack since 9-11.
Muslims are at war with us, Chuck Haggles.
Yeah, there hadn't been an attacker in 9-11.
Wonder why that is.
And because there hasn't been an attack, because the economy's doing well, we got a bunch of people here who, if they choose, can pretend that nothing's wrong in the world.
Go about their lives, and they don't have to be concerned about it at all because other Americans are taking on the responsibility.
Fine and dandy, no criticism.
But it's an explanation for why people uh are are able to put 9-11 out of their minds and forget that this is all interrelated.
The war on terror is going to take as many places.
Iraq, Afghanistan, and probably other places eventually.
I mean, look at what's look at what Iran's doing with the 15 Brits.
Uh and Chuck Hegel says that we're perceived to be at war with the Muslims around the world.
The uh the whole point here is to create a stable Iraq and an Iraq that is sovereign and governing.
And we want that as quickly as possible.
Everybody running this war wants that as quickly as possible.
But you don't lie to yourself and say it's been achieved when it hasn't been.
Now the problem with Maliki has been that his sect is the Sunnis, and that happens to be what the Iranians are, and he's been buddy buddy with Moktada al-Sadr.
He hadn't had any guts to go after Al-Sadr.
We read him the riot act, he's done a 180 on this, all solder still out of the country in Iran.
Al Sadr and his um and his Mahdi army have sort of fled the scene.
Everybody's waiting for them to come back when they think the time is right.
Uh, but we can uh we can do as much as we can to prevent their return being the uh day of disaster that everybody expects uh that it is going to be.
Uh if you're gonna listen to people like Dingy Harry for your is your source authority on this, you're just gonna have to accept the fact that you're listening to a bunch of political partisan lies in order to advance his and his party's political advantage in 2008.
That's you want to sign up for that?
You're right.
Feel free.
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