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April 30, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:04
April 30, 2007, Monday, Hour #2
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I've always found it fascinating that the one Democratic politician that most Democrats just admire, even 50 years later, now nearly 50 years, they call him their role model is John F. Kennedy.
Because no Democrats are like John F. Kennedy.
Everything he stood for is what they're now against.
I mean, the book that he wrote that put him on the map, at least the book that who is it, Sorensen that ghostwrote it for him?
Profiles and courage.
Is there a political party that more avoids taking a courageous stand than the Democrats?
Look at the war right now.
You can track democratic opposition to the war on a graph.
The number of Democrats that spoke out against it and the type of actions that they took in opposition, you can track that alongside a separate graph that shows public opinion on the war, and it just matches.
When the war was overwhelmingly popular with the American people, it was overwhelmingly popular with Democratic politicians.
When the American public started to fall off a little bit on the war, that's when you started to see Democrats begin to raise objections or waffle.
Remember Kerry, yes, I voted for the war before I voted against it.
That was when they were in the we don't know which side were on mode.
Well, they didn't know what side to be on because the polls are right around 50% then.
And for a democratic politician, that's a real dilemma.
Never mind any actual belief in principle here.
They're just chasing the polls on something as important as a war.
As the war got even less popular to the point that it's at now, democratic opposition has intensified, their rhetoric has gone grown stronger, and the actions they have taken have been more belligerent.
It is very difficult to continue to support something that is not popular with the majority.
It's not easy to do.
Anybody can take a 90% position.
It's harder to stand by something that you believe in when it's no longer popular.
Whether you support President Bush's current policy on the war or not.
He deserves our respect for acting on his sincere beliefs.
Bush doesn't have his finger up in the air on this issue.
He's not making his policy with regard to Iraq on the basis of what public opinion says.
He's not even acting with regard to his own self-interest.
...
In terms of Bush's self-interest, he could pull out of a rack right now and say we've achieved all of our goals.
He could move on.
He could therefore focus his administration for the next two and a half years on other priorities.
That would probably be in his political interest.
But he's not doing it because it's not what he believes in.
As for myself, I'm not personally fully sold on the latest part of the strategy.
I'm not opposed to the surge, because I frankly don't know what else we're supposed to do at this point, but I'm also not embracing it.
For me, the goals that I had for the war with Iraq have been achieved.
I felt it was very important to stand up to a dictator who is defying the United States of America and for that matter the UN On the weapons inspections.
I also felt it was very, very important to guarantee that weapons of mass destruction do not fall into the hands of terrorists.
And like most, I was under the impression that Saddam had them.
It was my goal to depose the government of Saddam, which had been thumbing its nose at the United States for years, and let us also remember that Saddam Hussein had put out a death order on the first President Bush.
An action that in and of itself is grounds for the United States removing him.
After removal of Saddam, my goals were to secure the infrastructure of Iraq so that we wouldn't spend a fortune rebuilding the nation, and we didn't leave a country that was in such shambles that it would be a breeding ground for terrorism for the future.
And my goal was to help the Iraqis put in place a new government that would be friendly to the United States.
Those were the reasons I supported the war, and those were the things that I hoped would happen.
Every one of those things was achieved gloriously.
As for this next phase that we're in, having the new Iraqi government, the one that was chosen by the Iraqi people survive and thrive.
Not what I'm not so sure about.
How long do we have to be there for to survive and thrive?
What's the test?
Three years, five years, ten years, fifty years, a hundred years.
I'm not saying I'm against it.
I'm just saying that I have doubts about whether or not this is the most important issue in the world for us foreign policy wise.
I think Iran is a much bigger priority for me at least right now than Iraq, which is not to say that I'm overtly opposed to what the president is doing, because I'm not.
I'm just saying that he hasn't convinced me, personally, that what we're doing right now is of the priority that he's making it.
However, saying that, which is merely expressing my opinion, and doing what most on the American left and virtually every Democrat in the Congress except Lieberman is doing are two very different things.
The thing that gets lefties and Democrats more upset than anything else is when you challenge their patriotism.
Hear it from all the time, you're questioning my patriotism.
How dare you question my patriotism just because we disagree with you, that is not grounds for you demagogues on the right to question my patriotism.
Well, I question their patriotism, basing that on their actions.
I don't believe the way they're conducting themselves right now is patriotic.
I'm sorry.
Well, I guess that means I'm questioning their patriotism.
First of all, they never act patriotically to begin with.
They resent all of the vestiges of patriotism that you ever see.
You know they resent the Pledge of Allegiance.
They don't like the notion of having to stand for the national anthem.
They never admit that stuff, but you know that's what they think.
But aside from that, the way they are conducting themselves now is not patriotic.
It is one thing to oppose the war.
And in America, you have a right to hold any position that you want.
Even if you're doing it for opportunistic political reasons, you still have that right.
They can get up and criticize the war, they can get up and call for a withdrawal from the war, they could do whatever they want to do.
They can even say that they hope that Iraq falls into civil war.
They can do all of those things.
And we can disagree with them or you can agree with them.
Be your position or you can have a different position.
Where I believe the Democratic Party right now is crossing the line and acting unpatriotically, is they are taking actions that directly Weakens their own country at a time of war and weakens American soldiers at a time that they are engaged in combat overseas.
That's a line you shouldn't be crossing.
First of all, you can only have one commander in chief.
That doesn't mean he's the dictator, and it doesn't mean he's the only person who has anything to say about foreign policy.
It does mean, however, exactly what the term implies, commander in chief.
It means he runs the military and he directs military operations.
You can't have it done by committee.
It doesn't work.
President Bush is the commander in chief, and while we can criticize him, criticize him, to try to take away his authority at the time he's leading this military is wrong.
It's bad policy, it's counterproductive, and it's morally indefensible.
They are trying to weaken the president at knowing that weakening the president and weakening our own stance aids the enemy.
The Shiites who want nothing more than to have us leave so that they can overrun and slaughter all the Sunnis as payback for the hell that occurred during Saddam.
They love the notion of us leading leaving, and they love the notion of Democratic politicians using official government action to try to get us to leave.
The Sunnis who are bent on civil war over there and don't ever want to live under Shi'i control and are hoping that if we leave, they can get the remnants of Saddam's bath party back together and retake their country, they'd love for us to leave.
The Iranians who are sitting next door who would love nothing more than to annex Iraq, they'd love us to leave.
So who are these Democratic politicians helping?
As for passing resolutions, passing laws, passing funding measures that call for a withdrawal date, what kind of war planning tells the enemy when you're going to leave?
You never tell the other side what your plans are.
Even if they believe we should leave now or in October or February, you don't say it out loud and advertise it to the enemy unless you're trying to help them.
Somebody who leaks information to the other side isn't on your side, yet that's what they're doing.
And yes, I think the Democrats have crossed a line right now.
They have gone from opposition to policy of the president to taking action that is aiding the enemy at a time of war.
Who's this helping?
Who's happy about the stand they're taking?
It's the very enemy we're fighting.
And that is wrong, and it deserves our condemnation.
My name is Mark Gilling, and I'm sitting in today for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
The telephone number at EIB is 1-800-282-282.
Liberals love what the Democrats in Congress are doing.
Because for American liberals, the thing that gives them the greatest joy is beating up on President Bush.
The thing that's become apparent to me is they have no line.
What's the line you guys won't cross?
If you have a line, it's never even occurred to them that there might even be a line.
Well, of course there's no line.
If you look at the lefty websites, they're not even satisfied with this.
By the way, what was the issue that they ran on in the 2006 elections ad nauseum?
The minimum wage, the minimum wage, the minimum wage, the minimum wage.
So they go and they put the minimum wage in the legislation that they know the president is going to veto, the war funding act that included the withdrawal deadline.
Why'd they put it in there?
They put it in there for political reasons because they want to force Bush to veto an increase in the minimum wage because they know the president is obviously going to veto any withdrawal date for the war.
Since they also know that most Republicans are going to vote to uphold going to vote to uphold the president's veto, that means they get a free one.
Look, we've got Republicans voting on record as voting against the increase in the minimum wage because they supported the president's veto.
When they run their campaign ads in 2008, they aren't going to point out that they stuck the minimum wage into a completely separate bill dealing with the war.
If the minimum wage was so doggone important to them as they claimed when they ran in 2006, why are they not passing it as a separate bill?
Why are they instead now politics with the war?
Well, we think it's an effective political tactic.
That's all they care about.
Is effective political tactics.
Bantam, Connecticut, Mark, you're on Russia's program with Mark Belling.
Hello, Mr. Billings.
Thank you for taking my call.
Um the the point you made earlier about how the Clinton administration uh neutered the CIA all goes back to political correctness.
And uh I remember 15, you know, almost 20 years ago when you know Rush was railing against political correctness.
You know, you couldn't you you couldn't name your basketball team the Indians anymore.
And everybody said, Well, what's the big deal?
You don't want to insult, you know, Native Americans, so you know it's no big deal.
And then you couldn't say, you know, um gay anymore or what's the right thing.
Right.
We know all the we know all the rules that they've established.
Right.
So so now it's it's come to a point where you cannot call your enemy your enemy.
If your enemy is evil and he cuts off people's heads and puts it on the internet, you can't show it on television.
You can't say what these people are doing.
You can't say that they're radical Islamists because you're going to insult someone.
And so this is where we are.
We we are at a point where we cannot call our enemy our enemy.
Well, but under understand, though, that that's not where the Democrats were only five years ago.
When President Bush was condemning Saddam and condemning the brutality in Iraq, he was being echoed and parroted by Democratic politicians.
They didn't decide to oppose this war until the war started becoming unpopular.
Just like Tennett himself, the guy who was the architect of all the intelligence that the Bush administration used, both of the American people and of the free world.
He's now the guy that's out there saying that the president screwed up the war.
All of this is political opportunism and isn't based at all on any kind of principle whatsoever.
Well, you know, you you're absolutely right.
And and I blame I blame the president and I blame the Republican Party for not disseminating the same information that you and Rush and some of the other conservatives are.
It's up to them to do this.
They need to take a, you know, to take a stand and tell us this.
We shouldn't have to rely on you guys.
You know, you know, though, if you're a football team and the quarterbacks gone back to pass three times in a row, they've been sacked sixteen times each time.
It just gets hard to go back, and I really think that they're suffering from battle fatigue right now.
Cook, thank you for the call.
Cookville, Tennessee, Kathy.
It's your turn on EIB.
Hi, Mark.
I want to give you dittoes from the heart of Run Fred Run land.
I love Fred Thompson.
Now we had a great.
I love Fred Thompson.
You know, a lot of Republicans are looking for a presidential candidate.
I declare that I love Fred Thompson.
What's in your mind, Kathy?
Well, I wanted to give you my heartfelt thanks and congratulations for finally being the first voice I've heard on the radio.
Cross the PC line and call some of these Democrats unpatriotic.
We have American soldiers that are right now in an incredibly difficult situation.
Even accepting the Democrats' version of what's happening in Iraq, this is ungodly dangerous.
You've got Shiites who want to kill Sunnis, you have Sunnis who want to kill Shiites, you have Al Qaeda which wants to kill everyone, you have Iran sitting across the border trying to mess everything up over there, and you have American soldiers trying to prop up a government that hasn't even figured out how to prop itself up.
And in the meantime, we've got politicians here in our country trying to pass laws that would aid The enemy, if that isn't anti patriotic, what would they have to do in order for me to justify using that term?
And I think that the term is justified.
No one wants to say it because they always take this great umbrage.
I can't believe you are questioning my patriotism.
What they are doing now has never been done in American history.
We have never tried to cut off funding for a military operation while it was going on.
The closest thing we have is Vietnam.
They cut off funds after our soldiers left.
They're trying to do this while we're still fighting, and that is something that they cannot morally defend.
I'm Mark Ellington for Rush Limbaugh.
Let's play this out.
Congress passes its bill to continue to fund the war effort, but it puts in this October 1st withdrawal deadline.
They throw in the minimum wage in there too.
By the way, they've also filled the thing up with pork.
They couldn't resist that.
They've got their earmarks in there, they've got their special projects.
All that's in the war funding, though.
Bush vetoes it.
He vowed to veto it.
He is going to veto it.
Harry Reed and Dictator Pelosi, they say, okay, we're just gonna pass it again.
President vetoes it again.
Every war funding bill that we have, they force the president to veto because they put in the withdrawal date.
At some point we're actually going to get to a stage in which you need to have authorization to continue to spend money on the operation.
How far are they going to play this out?
Unless the president simply ignores the law, he's not going to have money for supplies for the troops that are in Iraq.
What do they want to do?
Cut off their meals, cut off their weapons, cut off all their equipment supplies.
Whether you like this war or not, there are Americans that are fighting it.
There have to be some issues that are beyond pure politics.
And don't misunderstand me.
I am not taking away their prerogative to rip the war.
Or even for that matter to try to end it.
I am challenging their tactics here.
Nobody else does that other than conservative talk radio hosts.
They're not going to get it from anything other than Rush.
I'm just trying to raise your consciousness to the notion that there may be a line that you don't cross.
I wasn't a big fan of the war in the Balkans.
Never really understood what the vital American interest was there.
We were told that there was ethnic cleansing going on.
We were told that Slobodan Milosevich was the next Hitler.
I never really bought into any of it.
That doesn't mean that once American troops were there, that you take actions that could endanger them.
You don't do that.
These are tactics that weren't even used during Vietnam, the most divisive war this nation ever had.
When you hear Harry Reid questioned, or Nancy Pelosi questioned, Thank you.
They keep saying we want to keep the heat on President Bush.
They aren't in the minority anymore.
They run the Congress, which is one of the three branches of this nation.
And they are the body that does make appropriations.
To use the appropriation process to try to tie the hands of the commander-in-chief at a time that he is fighting a war is simply wrong.
And even if you oppose the war, you ought to object to the way in which Democrats in Congress are trying to sabotage this war effort.
Ocala, Florida.
Ken, it's your turn on Rush's show.
10,000 dittos, Mark.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I uh you know I was listening here, I listen to Rush every day, and so does my brother Ben and Albuquerque and Jess and Madison, Mississippi, and they all we we all uh rush bo babies and all that stuff.
But you you talked about George Tenet here as if somebody just turned on a light bulb and everything else.
Now we've been talking for two or three years about the fact that that it was bad intelligence that's got us in there.
We're all veterans.
I'm 20 years.
And and yet the president gave them the highest medal a civilian can get.
He and Bremer and and Tommy Franks.
I don't know how he got it.
He's a general.
But he he got him up there and decorated them for an outstanding job they did.
Now, how can he do anything?
Uh Mark, uh, and come back with uh now he comes out exposing after three or four years of how uh the president didn't listen to him, and and I know I collected intelligence for twelve years in the military.
Well, you're well, you're you're right with regard to Tennant.
You're also right about Bush.
Bush put way too much faith in intelligence that he got from the CIA.
I don't think he ever fully grasped, maybe until now, how much A the CIA didn't like him.
It is really an agency filled with Valerie Plains, and he didn't grasp that the CIA could have been as wrong with its intelligence as it was give them those battles.
Why did he give him a chance to do it?
He shouldn't have taken guess.
He shouldn't have.
He should have fired him when he came into office.
It was exactly the biggest mistake the president made in the war was trusting the intelligence and not understanding that the CIA may have been wrong.
That was the biggest mistake that he made in this war.
In terms of the operational aspect of the war, that's been brilliant.
The mistakes that have occurred, both in terms of overselling the weapons situation and in terms of not knowing how to deal with three different factions trying to destabilize the country, those were failures of intelligence.
And that goes directly to the CIA and goes directly to Tenet.
And as for Tennant, who, by the way, was very happy to accept uh the uh what was it, the Medal of Freedom that the president gave him it was a high honor.
For him to accept it and now turn around and say that the president was ignoring all of his advice.
Well, why didn't he say that then?
All George Tenet is trying to do is rehabilitate his own image.
He wants to go on the pundit circuit now and he wants to be somebody who can talk about all this stuff.
He presumes the Democrats win the White House in 2008.
He wants to be right back in the fray.
So he's trying to re-earn his stripes with the left by taking a free shot at the president.
Well, somebody ought to raise the fact that he's the last person in the world that ought to be taking any shots at all.
Thank you for the call, Ken.
Savannah, Georgia, Tom, it's your turn on Russia's show.
Mark, thanks for having me on.
My point is is if you think Tenant is the big uh one raising the fuss now, wait until after the election is lost, and you see the Republic Republicans come out of the woodwork with their books stating how atrocious this war was, how horribly it was ran, planned how horribly it was ran.
And you haven't seen anything.
Uh Tennant is nothing compared to you're even gonna have presidential candidates who lost the election writing books.
Well, I think you've seen a little of that already, and I don't mean to say that Tenet's the only guy here who's acting like a Monday morning quarterback.
There was an article in Vanity Fair magazine that came out right before the 2006 election.
A lot of the neoconservatives who supported the war strongly criticized the president for the way that the war was being fought.
Nobody wants to embrace a policy that isn't popular anymore.
The reason I single out Tennant is that it was his job to provide intelligence.
And without regard to your position on the war, the one thing we can all agree on is that the intelligence was screwed up.
And for Tenet to join all of these critics is rather absurd.
I do think that if you supported the effort, you at least ought to be consistent and still support the goals now.
Tactics are something that we can disagree about.
But with regard to Tenet, the reason that I gave so much focus to him is all of a sudden he gets to go on 60 minutes and write a book and profit off of saying that the Bush administration screwed up when its biggest screw up was listening to him in the first place.
George Tenet should be the last person in the world who should have anything to offer on the issue of Iraq.
The biggest screw up was Bush not listening to his father and not listening to Colin Powell.
That was the biggest screw up, and you've got to admit that.
Well, listen to them about what?
Well, Colin Powell and his father both said you can't invade, you can't go into Baghdad.
Do what you need to do, take care of what you need to take care of an identity.
You know what, Tom?
I don't admit that.
Because I still believe that going into Baghdad was the right thing to do.
I'm not somebody who says looks at a poll that sees thirty-seven percent popularity for the war, thirty-five percent saying it was the right decision to do, and turn around and change my opinion.
I'll first of all remind you that most people in America, including most Democrats, faulted the first President Bush for not, quote, finishing the job by going to Baghdad.
There was no there was no point in invading Iraq at all if you weren't going to go to Baghdad and replace the government of Saddam Hussein.
And the situation now is better than the situation that existed before we started that war.
Because without regard to what happens from this point forward, we did establish that if the United States says it's going to do something, it's going to do it.
We did establish that we weren't going to tolerate the open defiance of Saddam Hussein.
And even in Iraq, which admittedly is deeply divided right now for reasons that have everything to do with the inability of Muslims to get along with other Muslims because of Shiites hating Sunnis, because of Sunnis hating Shiites, even in Iraq right now.
You still have a nation that was virtually unanimous in saying that it was glad to be rid of Saddam Hussein.
He was hanged by his own people, and there weren't a whole lot of Iraqis that objected to that.
So no, I'm not going to say that there was a mistake that was made with regard to the decision to get into the war.
I think you can question whether or not it's a mistake to continue to fight this war now and continue to try to prop up a government that hasn't figured out how to govern its own nation.
That's an open question.
But no, I don't believe it was a mistake to go into that war, and I certainly don't believe that you ought to be passing resolutions demanding that our country withdraw when it is not your position as a member of Congress to make the determination about when we stay or when we would withdraw.
Those are logistical decisions that ought to be left to the president.
Thank you for the call, Tom.
I do appreciate it.
My name is Mark Elling sitting in for Russell.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh here at the uh Eastern headquarters of EIB.
Flew out yesterday.
My iPod, of course, wasn't charged up, so I was smart enough.
Saturday night, put the iPod in the charger, whole thing ready to go.
Get in the plane.
It's time you can use your electronic devices, pull out the iPod, which I realize I forgot to bring my headphones.
Do you know how useless an iPod is without having your headphones?
I suppose I could have held it to my ear, but that wasn't going to happen.
Uh President Bush, because he's in this position of weakness right now, is just the whipping boy for the world.
And we spend some time on today's program talking about how Democratic politicians have turned on the war.
I want to spend at least a moment talking about the tactics that they are using with regard to using the process of being able to hold hearings to simply smack the president around.
They started this with Alberto Gonzalez in the hearings into the non scandal over the firings of the United States attorneys, and they now want to do this with regard to the war.
Last week they subpoenaed Condoleezza Rice.
They didn't ask her to testify.
Over what over what she knew about the uh early stages of the war, the intelligence that they got from George Tennant subpoenaed her.
Didn't ask her to testify, subpoenaed her.
Now, historically, the executive branch has reported to the legislative branch.
They are equal branches of government.
The third, of course, is the judiciary.
Generally speaking, throughout our history, presidential administrations have reported to the Congress and gone up and faced hostile questioning.
The Congress has a right to ask for it, and the administration has an obligation to offer it.
But once again, they are going too far.
They are using this hearing process for fishing expeditions and witch hunts.
When you testify before Congress, you take an oath.
They just want to get Condoleezza Rice up there while under oath and try to get her to make a misstatement, to recall something incorrectly, so they can say that she lied.
They aren't trying to gather information.
They want to beat up on her.
They want to destroy her personally, and they want to catch her in some sort of misstatement.
That's what this is all about.
And I don't think it's a coincidence that the first two members of the administration to face this abuse are Gonzalez and Rice, the two most prominent minority group members in the administration.
You have a Latino and Gonzalez and Rice, who is obviously both black and a woman.
They hate the notion.
And look at what's happened to Gonzalez.
He had been speculated as a potential Supreme Court nominee if President Bush has another one.
Well, that's out the window now.
Condoleza Rice has been talked about as a future Republican candidate for president.
They want to knock that out as well.
After they're done with Rice, they'll find another issue.
They're just going to try to take every political disagreement that they have and scandalize it.
Turn it into a scandal.
What the president needs to do to reassert his authority is to say that he's not going to participate in this.
They ought to defy the subpoenas, which they have every right to do, simply assert executive privilege and say, I'm not going to send my people up there to be abused by you.
We have reported on the war.
The Secretary of State has in fact reported to the Congress under oath already about the intelligence information that they had leading up to the war.
In the meantime, the Europeans are beating up on the administration by going after Wolfowitz at the World Bank.
Admit it.
You didn't know that Wolfowitz had ended up at the World Bank until they tried to get him fired.
Paul Wolfowitz was uh top Bush aide, he became the head of the World Bank.
And uh I kind of thought that he just resigned to go back to a think tank or something because no one knows what goes on at the World Bank.
Well, now the World Bank wants to canon because supposedly he approved raises for his girlfriend who worked at the World Bank.
Now, if I follow through the illogic of this, it's okay to have a girlfriend that works with you and you can have sex with her in the Oval Office, but she can't get a raise if she works over at the World Bank.
In any event.
The raises were approved by the executive committee of the World Bank, and this is entirely trumped up.
They just want Wolfowitz out because Wolfowitz is a hardliner who's gone after the abuses that have occurred at the World Bank.
The World Bank is the biggest subprime lender in the world.
If you think we've got a problem with regard to bad home mortgages, the world bank is out there throwing around money to everybody who doesn't, and Wolfowitz has tried to crack down on some of this stuff, and he's tried to crack down and scale.
Well, the Europeans who've seen the World Bank as a way to access a lot of American money and throw it around to themselves and their friends, don't like Wolfowitz.
And it's because Bush is weak that they figure that they can go after him.
Everybody right now is after the president.
You've got the European Union leaders, in fact, in Washington today, the uh one of the heads of it, and then uh who's Germany's prime minister, Angela Merkel.
When they have the briefing that they always have, the president better not stand in front.
Don't ever let these people be behind you.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I've been advised that I have exactly 38 seconds in this segment.
Bad planning by the fill-in host, I understand that.
Uh no time to sneak in a call.
I do not want to imply by my comments here that you can't criticize the president of the United States and you can't criticize the administration.
Of course you can.
For example, Condoleza Rice is going to talk to the Iranians as part of this latest discussion in which they're going to bring everybody in to talk about Iraq.
I don't think we ought to do it.
I think it legitimizes them.
There's nothing wrong with that criticism.
There is a point, however, at which you frame your criticism in such a way that it weakens your country, and that's where it is fair to go after you.
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