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March 29, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:42
March 29, 2007, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
And the week is just zipping on by here, folks.
Here we are already at Thursday.
This is the fastest week in media, the fastest three hours in media, the Rush Limbaugh program.
And this is the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Great to have you with us.
The telephone number is 800-282-2882.
If you want to be on the program today, the email address, rush at EIBNet.com.
I have to go to Washington this afternoon, and I, you know how I get itchy about that.
That town is poison.
I'm going in there, and I'm coming back tonight.
I'm going to spend, I've got it figured away out of time things.
I'll spend no more than four hours on the ground.
I'm going to be with a bunch of conservatives anyway.
The Media Research Center is having their 20th annual big dinner tonight.
It's really fun, too.
Yeah, these are real conservatives.
They have their annual dinner.
They send out ballots.
I'm always one of the judges.
Some of the most outrageous comments of the drive-by media the previous year, the judges vote.
I'm having a mental, yeah, it's the dishonor awards is what it is.
And there's a bunch of categories.
And tonight, the results, as they are every year, are announced with the winner, each drive-by media winner in each category for the most outrageous, stupid statement.
And I am being given a first-time award tonight.
They've created a new award there, the William F. Buckley Greatest Conservative in the World Award, or something like that.
I forget what the actual name of it is.
And I'm receiving that tonight at the end of the program, which is a real honor.
I mean, to have an award named after William F. Buckley Jr., one of my idols, and to be named the first recipient of this quite proper.
I don't dispute that.
Nevertheless, it's a huge honor.
But I got to get up there and I got to get in there and get it and get out.
No, the drive-bys don't accept that.
No, the drive-bys aren't there.
Sam Donaldson shows up every year.
He's a friend of Brent Bozell.
This is Brent Bozell's bunch.
And Sam Donaldson's there now and then.
But there aren't too many drive-bys in there.
No, no, no, no.
I mean, they're permitted.
I mean, anybody can buy a ticket.
It says black tie optional, so I choose not to go black tie.
Anytime I see black tie optional, it's not for me.
And so anyway, I got to get out of here about 4 o'clock this afternoon to get up there for this thing.
And we'll be back here tomorrow for the regular excursion into broadcast excellence.
What are you shaking your head for?
It's a late night, but I mean, it's doable.
It's not a problem.
It's not like getting on a plane with 55 kids and flying to Scotland with the checkoff in Atlanta or whatever, the four and a half hour layo in Atlanta.
I mean, that's tough.
This is a piece of cake.
At any rate, I was on a golf course yesterday.
Folks, I am just booming the ball.
The fix that I got on the course last Sunday, so it's six hours out.
It's just, I'm having more fun than ever.
It's just, it's a whole different game.
I can't believe that I was not instructed this way early part of my, when I started playing golf in 1997.
But anyway, when I'm out there, one of the guys I'm playing with says, well, what about the Iranians?
My God, what are we going to do about the Iranians?
I mean, the Iranians just kidnapping people?
What are we going to do?
I said, nothing.
I said, those people got guts.
The Iranians have guts.
They just announced today, oh, guess what?
We've changed our mind.
We're not going to release the female prisoner that we've got.
And what's anybody going to do about it?
They know nobody's going to do anything about it.
They know the Brits aren't going to do anything about it except officially condemn it via diplomatic channels.
Yip, yip.
You think that's going to excite, bother Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
I mean, if you look at history, I mean, you find the Iranians, they have a history of not releasing hostages until a president in this country is elected that they fear.
In the last case, it would be, of course, Rinaldus Magnus.
So they're out there saying, yeah, we're going to release him.
No, we're not going to release.
We're going to release her.
Nope, we're not going to release her.
The GPS says, no, no, no, you guys, you Iranians, you seized our people while they were in Iraqi waters.
No, no, no, they were in Iranian water.
No, no, they were in a so nobody's going to do it.
And Newt Gingrich had a good idea.
He was on Hugh Hewitt's show out California yesterday.
He said, look, I'd do two things.
I'd go a first thing I'd do is I'd tell them under the radar, behind the scenes, not publicly, I'd say, you got 30 days.
If you don't release them in 30 days, we're going to take out the lone refinery you have to make gasoline.
You people want to live in the seventh century, we'll take care of it.
You'll all be walking in another month.
And then after we do that, we'll put a naval blockade in there.
This is what he thinks the Brits ought to be saying.
We'll put a naval blockade out there.
We'll make sure that no gasoline gets into your country.
We'll make sure that nobody can export anything to you.
And after a month of this, you'll be walking, including your leadership.
And if you want that, that's what Newt is suggesting without fail and without delay.
He said, that's not killing innocent civilians.
That's not doing anything, just surgical strikes against.
They've got one gasoline refinery.
This is an oil powerhouse, but they have to import their gasoline.
We've talked about this before and just wreck their economy.
The process of this would be just wrecking their economy.
If you want to do this, guys, you Iranians, fine.
But nobody's going to do anything.
I say that now.
I mean, it doesn't look like, I mean, the latest thing the Brits have done is gone to the UN and ask for condemnation.
So, well, Snerdley just asked me, when's the West going to realize that Iran's at war with the West?
Well, you must have forgotten the brilliance and the elocution that we heard yesterday from Senator Hegel.
We are at war with Muslims.
The world's perception is that we're at war with the Muslims.
We're the ones that are abusing prisoners.
We're the ones engaging in torture.
By the way, the Iranians are violating all these Geneva Conventions out there.
They can't put this woman in a burqa.
They can't dress her up like that and so forth.
But they're doing it's a violation of the Geneva Convention.
Of course, nobody in this country on the left to drive by media.
Nobody cares about any other nation's violation of any of these so-called agreements between nations, the Geneva Accords Conventions, or what have you.
By the way, you remember the call we got on Tuesday from Ron in Port Huron, Michigan.
This was the student at a university or college there whose computer class professor had said to him that if he had the power, he would assassinate or kill President Bush.
And Ron wanted to know what I thought he should do about it.
I said, well, first thing, you're not going to have to do much because you're going to be hearing from the Secret Service.
Secret Service hears about stuff like this, and they're very interested.
But if we went on and discussed it, he was going to write a letter to the dean and say, look, this is not what I paid tuition to come here for.
And this is reflecting poorly on the school.
And I urged him to copy the professor as well.
So I got his note from him.
Last night, dear Rush, I just got on my friend's computer.
She's a 24-7 member.
I'm soon going to be.
I spoke with you on Tuesday about my instructor.
Needless to say, the Secret Service met with me today.
I don't think my professor will be professing his beliefs anymore.
He's got a little smiley signal here.
Thank you so much for your time yesterday.
You really are a strong influence in my life.
Ron, if you have any questions about anything, please contact me.
It gives me his number here to get hold of him.
So I knew this is going to happen.
Secret Service got hold of him, found out secrets.
And then there's a reason I knew it was going to happen because they called us and they wanted the tape of the segment and so forth.
I know they're out there monitoring this program.
A lot of big fans out there in the Secret Service.
I don't know anything more than that.
But I just know the Secret Service does not take this stuff lightly.
I also got an email from, let's see now.
Did I print this out?
I know I printed it out.
Yes, Paula Spencer, the woman who wrote the piece in Newsweek.
We read yesterday.
She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
And I wonder how in the world she still lives in Chapel Hill with what she had written.
She wrote the piece about we're just inculcating our kids with fear of everything, fear of everything in life.
And it's creating a bunch of.
I also got a great email.
You know, had a little rant, yes, a little monologue here on this 26-year-old teacher I met at a water volleyball game back in the early 90s, all over the place about we're pushing our kids too hard.
And I gave as an example, this notion that women don't do well in math.
Who says?
You go out and tell them they don't do well in math, they're going to believe they don't do well in math.
I got a note, I got an email, subscriber to rushlimbaugh.com, female math teacher.
So happy that I had said what I had said.
She loves math, and it is hard.
It's hard for everybody.
And she's doing everything she can to learn it because she's now teaching it.
She says in her email that the students are just, they just think she's the meanest teacher in the world because she's making them learn long division.
She's making them learn fractions.
She's making them learn all of these things.
And she concluded after hearing my monologue yesterday that her problem is the teachers that these kids have had prior to reaching her class, that the other teachers have, whenever these kids have complained that it's too tough, the teachers have gone lax.
And she realizes that what I said was right.
She was thanking me through the teeth for this and said, but it's tough for these kids to think that I'm mean.
I'm considered the meanest teacher in the school.
And I wrote her back and I said, you keep it up.
You're not mean.
You're demanding.
You know these kids have potential.
You're trying to get them to fulfill their potential.
I said, what's going to happen to you is in a few years when these kids grow up, they're going to look back and remember you as their best teacher.
Not their favorite, maybe, but they're going to remember you as the best because you showed them that they had more potential than they realized themselves.
So, you know, these three little notes, it's just great kind of stuff to hear.
Paula Spencer's note, Dear Rush, I wrote the Newsweek My Turn article you read on your show today.
What Newsweek cut from my bio is that I'm the author of Momfidence and Oreo Never Killed Anybody and Other Secrets of Happier Parenting, which Crown released last fall.
And I write the Momfidence, Confidence, Momfidence column in Women's Day.
If you agreed with the Newsweek piece, you'll love the book.
So far, they haven't kicked me out of Chapel Hill, though neither my local paper nor the local NPR station will touch the book.
And for that matter, neither is a lot of national mainstream media, even though it got great attention from papers across the country.
Said National Review Online even made it a fall book pick.
Every day I hear from moms, relief to hear normalcy celebrated.
Guess if I were an ex-rock star addict mommy who drinks, I'd get their attention.
Those are the hot mom books now.
Instead, I'm all about the radical parenting notions of using common sense and trusting your gut, not your guilt.
So thanks for the mention.
She's sending a book along.
And of course, as all women do, she included her phone number.
I just love Dawn's reaction.
So I said yesterday about she's one of four of us here, and we're all guys.
And she's, Dawn, you're going to look back on these days.
Man, I thank you guys so much for showing me another part of the world.
Sort of like teachers.
You're not getting gray.
You're not getting gray.
You're a natural strawberry blood.
Anyway, the name of her book, Paula Smatcher's book, Momfidence and Oreo Never Killed Anybody and other secrets of happier parenting from Crown.
All right, a quick timeout.
Kyle, what's his name?
Samson testified today up in Capitol.
A lot of you people, if you paid me, this is about the Attorney General and the eight U.S. attorneys having been canned out there.
If you bought into the premise of the drive-bys prior to his appearance, you were ready for blood.
You were ready for a smoke and gun.
You thought you were led, we were all led to believe it.
Kyle Sampson is going to come up there and he was going to spill the beans on everything that happened.
But the Democrats have a different plan.
They don't want Kyle Sampson.
They want Samson to look good.
They want Rove.
They want Gonzalez.
We'll have details on this.
Senate has finally, the final passage of the bill to set the timeline for withdrawing troops in Iraq.
President again today, hey, you know, I told you people yesterday I'm going to veto this, and he reminded them again today that he's going to do the same thing.
So a lot to do on the program today, plus, of course, your exciting phone calls.
We'll be back.
How are you?
Nice to have you back.
Rush Limbaugh, as usual, having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
Have you seen this story in the New York Times?
It's a story by David K. Johnston.
And the headline of the story, income gap is widening.
And it's a sob story.
It's a three-handkerchief story about how the income gap is widening and the concentration of wealth in this country has never been in fewer hands than it is now.
In fact, the top 1%, those with incomes of more than $348,000 a year in 2005, received their largest share of national income since 1928.
What do you mean received?
Somebody up there deciding who earns what?
Federal income, federal government, somebody decides, okay, your income is going to be this.
Has anybody at the New York Times ever heard of the concept of earning income?
At any rate, the top 1%, those with incomes of more than $348,000 in 2005, received their largest share of national income since 1928.
That date, that year, resonate with any of you people?
Why, we're on the verge of a depression, folks.
We're on the verge of the Great Depression.
They trace this back to 1928, 1929.
What is the conclusion we are supposed to draw from the emphasis on 1928 about W's economic policies?
All right, back to the archives.
I want to return to the archives this program, audio tape from Monday, February 5th, the day after the Super Bowl.
This is Jim Nance, CBS, interviewing the winning coach of the Super Bowl, Indianapolis Colts, Tony Dungy.
I'll tell you what, I'm proud to be representing African American coaches, to be the first African-American to win this.
It means an awful lot to our country.
But again, more than anything, I said it before, Lovey Smith and I, not only the first two African Americans, but Christian coaches showing that you can win, doing it the Lord's way.
We're more proud of that.
And I said this following the airing of that bite, that he was proud to be a Christian coach, mentioning the strong faith of not only himself, but Lovey Smith, the coach of the Bears.
They won the way the Lord asked them to.
These remarks were, I think, the mark of a true person of faith.
Because for such people, their religious identity transcends their race or their politics or their gender, every other distinguishing feature.
Clear from the way that Dungy lives his life and the kind of person he is that his distinguishing feature is indeed that he's a Christian.
And I've been looking at the drive-bys today to see if there's any reference to this.
I haven't found any reference to this.
It embarrasses the drive-bys.
Well, I wish he hadn't said, oh, God, I don't want to.
Well, we'll focus on a black coach thing.
I got a note from a friend to say, how long is it going to take the NFL to apologize to the world for the references to God last night in the post-game show?
Well, there has been some excrement hit the fan.
Dungy attended a fundraiser for an organization that is opposed to gay marriage in Indianapolis recently.
And this has caused a blogger from the Washington Post to unleash.
Newsbusters.org has the story, Tim Graham, WashPost blogger Tony Dungy's religious, just like 9-11 aggressors and racists.
Though Dungy's position may not constitute gay bashing per se, it certainly implies that homosexual Americans are not entitled to the same rights as heterosexual citizens, much the same way as conservatives have in the past condemned mixed racial marriages in support of family values.
Moreover, the pretext of acting on the Lord's behalf, quote unquote, has for millennia been used by some as an excuse for the most unholy acts among them, 9-11.
Those supporters of Dungy are quick to point out he's only exercising his First Amendment rights, so too then are those who advocate for racial purity, ethnic cleansing, and drinking the Kool-Aid.
The bottom line here is that by disenfranchising a group of citizens because of his religion, Dungy is essentially placing the values of church above the rights of the state.
Even though he's entitled to that opinion of inequality, the government is not entitled to act upon it.
And while, as some have said, Tony Dungy's Super Bowl triumph illustrated how black people are capable of anything white people are, his comments seemingly reinforced that discrimination is among those capacities.
So Tony Dungy, self-confessed and witnessing Christian before the nation in victory after the Super Bowl, has now been called a racist or at least a bigot by a blogger at the Washington Post stemming from his open admission that he is a Christian first and an African American and everything else second.
The blogger here is, what's the blogger's name?
Ben Dominich is the blogger at the Washington Post who wrote what I said.
I just wanted to share this with you because it's, again, evidence of my being on the cutting edge of societal evolution.
We'll take a brief break.
We'll come back.
Your phone calls on tap soon, so sit tight.
Hey, you see where they got rid of the fat kid off of American Idol last night?
I didn't watch it either.
I just saw a little bit of it on TV, thought I'd mention it, act like I watch it relate to even more people.
They got rid of the fat kid.
They're worried about the kid that's getting the most votes.
He's obviously not talented, but his looks are getting the Mohawk guy.
Anybody say this show's going to destroy its credibility if this guy wins the final comment because apparently he has no talent.
He's just being popular.
Yep, yep.
All right.
President Bush today, live from the White House.
This is after the Senate made it official 5147 timeline get out of Iraq March 31st, 2008.
Yesterday, I gave a speech making it clear that I'll veto a bill that restricts our command on the ground in Iraq, a bill that doesn't fund our troops, a bill that's got too much spending on it.
I made that clear to the members.
We stand united and saying loud and clear that when we've got our troops in harm way, we expect that troop to be fully funded.
And so it sets up the showdown that will come.
They got a conference bill.
Ben Nelson, by the way, the senator from Nebraska, who voted procedurally yesterday in the first quote that was 50 to 48, changed his mind, voted for a set timeline.
Story in the stack today says, if the conference report has a firm date, I'm not voting for it.
So Ben Nelson voting both ways, which will give him a chance to say to critics, well, he can do a John Kerry on this, I suppose.
Let's move on to Kyle Sampson, who was testifying today before the leaky Leahy Judiciary Committee in the United States Senate.
There was a lot of hubbub about Kyle Sampson.
He's a quitter resigned, one of the two.
And a lot of people were expecting fireworks.
But he went up and said, hey, the process was just fine.
Everything we did was perfect.
We did get rid of some guys because they weren't enacting the president's policies, but I don't think that's inappropriate.
And this is important because this guy being called up there, he's being looked at as the authority.
So he said the whole process here was fine.
Everything we did, we could make a case for, but we botched the way we handled it.
And he finally came out and said, this is what they wanted today, that Gonzalez lied.
Or let's put it that Gonzalez wrongly stated that he was not involved in discussions about the firings of federal prosecutors.
I don't think the Attorney General's statement that he was not involved in any discussions was accurate, said Sampson.
I remember discussing within this process of asking certain U.S. attorneys to resign.
We've got a couple soundbites.
That's 15 and 16 coming up here in just a second, Mike.
But the L.A. Times today's story, former justice official defends firings.
He said, look, you can be a great attorney and still not be in line with the president's policy.
And that's fine and dead.
President, these people serve at the pleasure of the president.
So it's important here to remember that Sampson did not disparage or criticize the process because you have to understand it's not about that.
The Democrats want Samson looking good.
They don't want people to focus on an underling.
They don't want people to focus on Gonzalez, chief of staff.
They want Gonzalez, and then they want Rove.
And to prove that, here is a little soundbite from PMS NBC before the hearing started.
It's Chip Reed talking with their anchorette, Amy Roebuck, who said, Chip, what kind of tone do you think we can expect from the senators on this committee?
What's going on here is that they are making clear that there are bigger fish to fry out there.
They don't want Kyle Sampson to look like the bad guy, the symbol of everything and the reason that everything went wrong here, because what they're really trying to do is trace this up the line to Gonzalez and Karl Rove and perhaps others.
So they don't want to, you know, unload on this guy, make it look like he made all the mistakes, and in a sense, exonerate people above him.
And here's a couple sound bites.
Chuck Schumer talking to Kyle Sampson.
Here's Schumer first.
Now, notice he asks the questions and answers them in the question.
He said, okay, that the mistake that occurred here was that information you had, Kyle Sampson had, was not shared with individuals within the department.
Is that true or false?
I shared information with anyone who wanted it.
I was very open and collaborative in the process, in the preparation for Mr. McNulty and Mr. Michelle's testimony.
I want to ask, did you share information with Mr. McNulty and Mr. Michelle?
I did.
So the Attorney General's statement is wrong.
You see.
You see, you see where this is headed.
And of course, there's a story somewhere in the stack.
The Republicans in the Senate and the House are all upset at this because it's taking away their message.
What message?
May I ask the Republicans, what message?
What is it about you that compels you to sit there on your hands while this is going on?
You know full well what this is.
This is an effort to get Gonzalez.
And then after Gonzalez, it's an effort to get Rove, and it's an effort to keep on moving up the administration hierarchy as high as they can go on this and this.
And they're not going to stop with this, whatever else comes down the pike.
They just went out there and hired outside lawyers to conduct because they don't have enough government lawyers on staff to do all the investigations of the administration.
And the Republicans just sit there scared to death to align themselves with the administration.
It's an election year.
Obviously, well, it's an election season.
And so, and by the way, there are a lot of conservatives in the media.
Get rid of Gonzalez.
Get this off the table.
Get rid of it.
It was incompetent.
Get him out of there.
Shouldn't have been there in the first place.
You know, that doesn't help when people on our own side want to throw this guy overboard.
It's no longer about Gonzalez.
It's not about whether he's competent or incompetent or any of this.
It's about destroying the administration.
And I'm at a loss to understand why it is that even some people on our side in the conservative media think throwing Gonzalez away is going to stop this.
Now, they'll say, well, that's not what we're trying to do.
We want competence.
We are conservatives.
We have high values and high standards.
This is a battle going on here for the, you know, there's an election that's going to hinge on stuff like this.
And everybody the administration throws overboard is a tantamount admission to people that pay scant attention to politics.
There's all kinds of corruption going on in there.
You can sit there on your lofty perch and talk about we want competence and we want this.
This will stand us in good stead in the future.
We're fair.
So many people don't understand or want to ignore the impact of the fight that this is about.
When I see that Republicans are worried, we got to get this off the table because it's taking us off message, Rip.
If I hear this one more time, I'm going to blow a gasket.
We can't get our message out.
Well, the press won't cover us.
I guarantee you, all it takes one Republican to stand up here and call the Democrats and what they're doing and say what it is and BEMO.
You're going to have coverage.
They don't do it.
Don't ask me why.
You've been asking me why for 18 years and I don't have an answer.
I don't have an answer other than the ones that I've given you.
Now, up next, Senator John Cornyn is talking to Kyle Sampson.
And Cornyn says, is there any reason, to your knowledge, to believe that the replacement of a U.S. attorney with another individual appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate would in and of itself tend to interfere or impede with any investigation into any criminal, serious criminal matter that a U.S. attorney's office was investigating or prosecuting?
Not to my knowledge.
My observation was that U.S. attorneys, political appointees, came and went.
We had participated in the selection of all of the U.S. attorneys from the beginning of the administration, and about half of them had already left office.
There was much turnover in the U.S. attorney ranks.
And it never was my belief that a U.S. attorney changeover would have much influence at all on a particular case.
See, there is no crime here.
It is what we have been telling you after all of this started.
There is no crime and there is no scandal within the context of getting rid of these eight U.S. attorneys.
So the Democrats are trying to create a scandal by saying Gonzalez came up to them and lied, that Gonzalez lied about his role and that constitutes lying to Congress, which is what they tried to get Ollie North on and a number of other people in the Iran-Contra era.
And then once Gonzalez is said to have lied before Congress, which was the meat of Kyle Sampson's testimony today, then Congress can say, well, who else have been lying to us about this and other things?
We need Rove.
We need Rove under oath.
We need subpoenas for all the...
Getting rid of Gonzales is not going to stop this.
And meanwhile, there's this, you know, there's a country out there that hears little bits and pieces of this, but they're only hearing one side.
They're hearing the drive-by media side, but they're not hearing the Republican side, other than, as represented on this program and others like it.
So they're left to conclude that big-time scandal went on here.
In fact, USA Today has got a poll.
Do you think something's wrong about the firing of eight U.S. attorneys?
72% said yes.
72% of the American people, a bunch of blithering idiots who have no idea what they're talking about, but yet they vote, and so these polls matter.
72%, yes, you need to look into this.
This is horrible.
This is rotten.
72% of the people say the American system is broken when these U.S. attorneys can simply be fired by the president.
That is just an indication of so much ignorance out there, lack of civics education, and what have you.
Now, Matthews, just to show you they're looking for Rove, Chris Matthews last night, actually this morning, I'm sorry, on PMSNBC, before the hearing started, Chip Reed's talking with Amy Roebuck, and Matthew is in on the mix.
She says, Chris, do you think that Samson's offering himself up as a scapegoat here?
And how high do you think this goes?
Watch Arlen Spector.
He's a tough prosecutor.
He was DA of Philadelphia when I was growing up.
This guy is going to try to nail him and catch Karl Rove.
I think they're going after Karl Rove.
I think he's the big fish to be fried today because if you read about the accounts, this Rove is in the background.
Specter said he understands that Rove always suggests intrigue.
Well, Specter loves intrigue, and I think he's going to try to catch Rove involved in this.
Yeah, here that a Republican senator is going to try to catch Rove.
The ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee is going to try to catch Rove.
Rove cannot possibly have any role here.
There's nothing criminal about what happened.
But see, one of Rove's associates ended up as the U.S. attorney in Arkansas.
So?
This is just.
But anyway, I'm just illustrating here for you how these talking points have gone out.
These Democrats in the media to drive-bys know exactly what the Democrats on the committee are going to do.
So the next question: What are some of the tougher questions you think Kyle Sampson will have to navigate today, Chris?
I would zero in on three cases, Eglesias.
I'd ask a particular question, all which involve politics, and dare him to commit perjury.
I think today will be one of those days, you know, like when Alexander Butterfield testified during Watergate, one of those days where a nobody, so-called, testifies, but huge news is broken by, say, two or three this afternoon.
It's all Watergate all over.
I don't care these guys.
They got Watergate on the brain.
And Chris, you missed the memo.
Samson is not the sacrificial lamb.
Samson is going to be ending up looking good here.
So, like Alexander Butterfield, here's a little bit of Samson, by the way, saying that the decision to fire U.S. attorneys was perfectly proper and legal.
Contrary to some suggestions I've seen in the press, I was not motivated to resign by any belief on my part that I withheld information from department witnesses or intentionally misled either those witnesses or the Congress.
Mistakes I made here were made honestly and in good faith.
I failed to organize a more effective response to questions about the replacement process, but I never sought to conceal or withhold any material fact about this matter from anyone.
The truth of this affair is this: the decisions to seek the resignations of a handful of U.S. attorneys were properly made, but poorly explained.
This is a benign rather than sinister story, and I know that some may be disposed not to accept it, but it's the truth as I observed it and experienced it.
That's it.
There's nothing there.
And they knew he was going to say this.
This is the opening statement.
They knew he was going to say it.
The bombshell, quote unquote, is Gonzalez wasn't being honest when he said he wasn't involved.
That's where they're headed.
We'll be right back here, folks.
Take it.
Senator Kennedy in the Boston Globe today accused President Bush of using the firings of these eight U.S. attorneys to further the administration's right-wing ideology.
Senator Kennedy, this is an absolute laugh.
He said the veteran prosecutors were replaced by political operatives in key states to ensure that reliable partisans are in place in time for the 2008 presidential election.
This is simply outrageous.
This is another example of projection.
The Democrats, in this case, Senator Kennedy, accusing the Republicans of doing what the Democrats do by standard practice.
They stack as many of these agencies as possible with partisan operatives, as many think tanks and 527s as possible.
They stack the judiciary with partisan operatives, not judges.
They go out and find legal people that are partisan operatives.
They make them judges, district court judges, appellate judges, even Supreme Court nominees, if they can get there.
And they sit there and talk about this as though they are clean and pure as the wind-driven snow, never, ever governed by politics.
It's just more of an attempt to literally criminalize conservatism, is what's happening.
And the Republicans say, well, we got to get rid of Gonzalez because it's preventing our message from it.
Jesus, we can't get rid of Gonzalez.
After getting rid of Rumsell, does anybody think this is going to change anything?
Robert in Chico, California, I'm glad you called, sir.
Nice to have you on the EIB network.
Hello, Rush.
Yes, sir.
Mega Diddos.
Thank you.
My point is it seems like all the countries in the world, all the civilized countries in the world, have to fight by the Geneva Convention, yet Iran doesn't have to do that.
And why is it that we have developed our technology for the last 40, 50 years to where we don't really need soldiers?
Why can't we use our surgical strikes?
If they don't follow the rules, why do we have to?
And why do we have to put up with their crap for 30 years and let our soldiers die when they don't need to?
Well, there's answers to this you might not want to hear.
One of them is political correctness.
Exactly.
Liberals.
One of them, the leftist anti-war movement has succeeded in making anybody with power and anybody that has tremendous.
Well, my idea is maybe we could yell a little louder and have a poll to the United States people or the people all over the world.
Do you think it's fair that we fight by the rules and they don't?
A simple that's what I'm trying to tell you.
Wait a minute.
It's supposed to be unfair for us.
You don't understand liberalism.
You don't understand political correctness.
We're supposed to be at a disadvantage because it's not fair that we're so much more powerful.
They're supposed to be able to do what they did to the Brits, the Iranians are.
That's the only way these poor little people can fight back.
It's okay for them to have IEDs and blow up car bombs and so forth.
It's okay because they're just a bunch of discriminated-against little backwards people with no economic future.
We're already poisoning the planet.
We're already destroying it.
Global warming, we're getting rid of all the animals.
We're polluting the planet.
These poor little people have nothing else they can do.
They must fight back.
They must fight back.
And you have to understand this about liberalism.
It does not permit discrimination.
They cannot discriminate.
And so you can't criticize the Iranians.
But they have a right to do this because we're so unfair.
You don't talk to them about fairness.
Sit tight out there, folks.
I can't do everything here in the first hour.
We will get to Diane Feinstein resigning from her subcommittee in scandal.
And also, Fidel Castro hits out at America's attempt to use biofuels.
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