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Aug. 1, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:35
August 1, 2007, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
It is August 1st, ladies and gentlemen, which is a, well, it's not just a big day here.
It is a huge day in the history of the United States.
It is also a huge day in the history of American media.
August 1st.
Oh, no.
August 1st, 1988, this program was born.
Oh, look at that.
Our little celebratory Nutra System blueberry muffin.
With one little county, blow it out.
Thank you all so much, Snerdley and Dawn and Brian bringing this in.
Oh, and look, there's a little card here.
They always embarrass me doing this.
Anyway, this program born August 1st, 1988, today is our 19th anniversary.
The birth of this program has brought about a sea change, a revolution in American media.
And it all could not have happened, of course, without me.
But it could not have happened actually without you, without you being there consistently in ever-increasing numbers with your incredible loyalty to this program.
We all appreciate it here more than you will ever know.
I want to bring in a special guest, ladies and gentlemen, to explain the significance.
Everybody thinks the 20th anniversary is going to be the big blowout, and of course, it will.
But the 19th anniversary is no slouch.
And we have an expert to explain the significance of the 19th anniversary of the EIB network.
In the background is the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorial.
Each one of these monuments is 19 feet high.
Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president.
Thomas Jefferson, the third president.
And 16 and 3 make 19 again.
What is so deep about this number 19?
Why are we standing on the Capitol steps today?
That number 19, when you have a 9, you have a wound that is pregnant.
And when you have a one standing by the nine, it means that there's something secret that has to be unfolded.
Abraham Lincoln statue, 19 feet high, 19 feet wide.
Jefferson, 19 feet high.
16th, third and the third president, 19th, standing on the steps of the capital in the light of the sun, offering life to a people who are dead.
And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, the significance of the 19th anniversary of the EIB Network.
And that was, of course, special guest Calypso Louie, Minister Farrakhan.
That's from the Million Man March, October 16th of 1995.
You got to hear this.
We've put together a great montage.
Dick Cheney, our hero, was on Larry King Alive last night.
And Larry asked questions that were written for him.
And Cheney answered in the way that only Cheney can.
This is a condensed version as a montage, but this is fabulous.
Don't you ever say, maybe I'm wrong.
No.
In retrospect, you would still go into Iraq.
Yes, sir.
So those 3,000-plus lives have not died in vain.
No, sir.
Does it pain you when Brent Scrocroft says this is not the Dick Cheney I knew?
Not especially.
Wouldn't you like to be liked?
Well, up to a point.
Remember, success for a politician is 50% plus one.
You don't have to have everybody on board.
You said that the Iraqis were well on their way to being able to defend themselves.
Why not?
Why aren't they gone?
Why are we gone?
They're not there yet because the job's not done yet, Larry.
Does it bother you that the Iraqi parliament is taking August off?
It's better than taking two months off.
Is General Petraeus the be-all and end-all?
General Petraeus is a very impressive officer.
Alberto Gonzalez.
You stand by him?
I do.
You're going to stand by him.
Yes, sir.
No doubt about that.
Correct.
The Scooter Libby trial.
Did it pain you?
Sure.
General Powell says he closed Guantanamo yesterday.
Would you?
No.
You have to torture them when they're there?
We don't do torture.
What are you going to do in February?
Oh, nine.
I have no idea.
And as Yogi said, it ain't over till it's.
It ain't over till it's over.
That's right.
Is that not fabulous?
Oh, just we love this guy here.
All right, here's a story from the French news agency about the crisis involving the youths in the UK.
British teenagers are among the worst behaved in Europe.
A study by a leading think tank said Thursday, blaming government.
Wait, I want you parents to listen to this.
A study by a leading think tank said Thursday, British teenagers among the worst behaved in Europe, blaming government policy, government policy failures for high levels of fighting, binge drinking, drug-taking, and underage sex.
The Institute for Public Policy Research, a bunch of libs, said that young Britons were left to their own devices through successive policy failures.
The report, Freedom's Orphans Raising Youths in a Changing World, was published as the government announced a new $184 million, or actually 275 million euro, 378 million dollar 10-year strategy for young people.
So the government claims they screwed it up, and so they come up with a new, more comprehensive plan that's going to spend even more money.
It makes sense to me.
It will be supplemented by cash from bank accounts dormant for 15 years.
This story goes on, and I can read the whole thing to you.
Britain is getting slammed for failing its out-of-control teens.
Not once in this story is the word parent mentioned.
Not once in this story will you read the word parent.
You have a lib think tank analyzing why British teenagers are so out of control, and it's because there are inadequate government programs.
Just a minute, I got a note.
An interesting email yesterday in the Rush Comments line.
Somebody subscribes to the website sent me a note and said, You know what?
You had a caller the other day, and I could just hear this guy typing in anger as he wrote.
You had a caller the other day, and he said, You've got to stop this play-by-play, Republicans versus Democrats.
We all know what the Democrats are.
We all know what the liberals are.
You've got to start teaching conservatism.
You don't do that enough.
You've got to be like Reagan.
You've got to start teaching conservatism.
And I thought about that.
He's got a point up to a certain extent.
But in the process of exposing liberalism, such as stories like this, are we not in fact teaching conservatism?
It still is a good point.
Maybe what I should do after reading one of these stories, rather than just assume all of you know that this is whacked out and silly and stupid, but also dangerous.
Government thinking it's responsible for raising kids, nanny government, liberals here do that.
Maybe follow it up by saying how conservatives look at this and how we philosophize over this.
And I think, don't I make that point when I say, not one time in this story will you see the word parent?
So anyway, I've been thinking about that.
And ultimately, the guy who wrote me the angry, frustrated, threatening letter has a point because conservatism, by its nature, is optimistic.
I don't want to contribute here to the doom and gloom of constantly reporting on liberalism without some optimistic follow-up to it.
Still, it must be done.
We laugh at this stuff constantly.
We have been doing so for 19 years.
And I think one of the reasons the left is so off the cliff now is because they are panicked.
This show, starting 19 years ago, led to the demise of the media monopoly that the left and all of its associations had, the think tanks, these bureaucracies and so forth.
They have to fight now for what they believe, but they can't do it openly.
They can't be who they are because nobody would support them.
Nobody would vote for them if they were actually honest about what they want to do.
But we're getting them closer to being that.
The Democrats in Congress are proposing appropriations bill with new tax increase.
It's going to get vetoed, but they're telling us who they are.
And I think it's important to keep pointing out who they are to people because I travel around.
I meet people all the time who are intelligent, think that they're engaged, think that they're involved, but haven't a clue about how politics works, how the government works, how the New York Times works, how the media works.
They haven't a clue.
They're intelligent, but they're not absorbed.
They're not engaged.
And this program's mission has been, among many other things, to create as large an army of informed, educated, engaged citizens as possible so that our ideas triumph legitimately with mandates following electoral victories.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back lots more straight ahead right after this.
Starting our 20th year today of broadcast excellence on the EIB network, Rush Limboy, here at 800-282-2882.
If you want to be on the program, the email address is rush at EIBnet.com.
Well, I tell you, I would not want to be Pakistan's president today, Musharraf.
I would not want this guy hanging by a thread anyway.
He is just barely holding on.
He's at loggerheads.
He's got a whole terrorist population.
He's got a moderate population.
He's got the United States as an ally.
We need to fly over Pakistan to get into Afghanistan, folks.
We cannot fly over Iran's airspace.
Found this out when I went into Dubai to stop for a couple of days and rest up for the trip into Afghanistan a couple of half, two and a half years ago or so.
You can't fly over Iranian airspace.
So what would normally be, I don't know, an hour, hour and a half is a three and a half hour flight because you've got to go around Iran.
You've got to go through and up Pakistan.
We have flyover rights.
It's the simplest and fastest way that we can get supplies to the troops, whatever is necessary in there.
And so this poor Musharraf, he wakes up today and he learns that Barack Obama wants to invade his country.
He wants to take the troops out of Iran and invade Pakistan.
Then after he hears Obama say that, he gets a video from some al-Qaeda hack who is suggesting that al-Qaeda conduct a coup against Musharraf and his government.
I think the biggest fear that Musharraf probably faces or has of these two is Obama.
If it weren't for the fact that he's running for president, it would be laughable.
What it is, is horribly naive, and he's just given Mrs. Clinton a hanging curveball here.
We have two sound bites from a speech he gave this morning in Washington at the Woodrow Wilson Center for hopeful presidential candidates to come make big-time speeches on foreign policy.
Here's cut one.
We went off to fight on the wrong battlefield with no appreciation of how many enemies we would create and no plan for how to get out.
And because of a war in Iraq that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged, we are now less safe than we were before 9-11.
Six years after 9-11, we are again in the midst of a summer of threat with bin Laden and many more terrorists determined to strike in the United States.
What's more, in the dark halls of Abu Ghraib and the detention cells of Guantanamo, we have compromised our most precious values.
Yada, yada, yada, the same old, same old, same old playbook song.
We're destroying our image around the world.
We are making them mad at us for all this imaginary torture that goes on at Abu Ghraib and Club Gitmo.
Here is another portion, the second bite of the Obama workout this morning.
He had to go give this big foreign policy speech, got to go out there and shore up his credentials and show the world he's a serious guy.
The president would have us believe that every bomb in Baghdad is part of al-Qaeda's war against us, not an Iraqi civil war.
He elevates al-Qaeda in Iraq, which didn't exist before our invasion, and overlooks the people who hit us on 9-11, who are training new recruits in Pakistan right now.
He is fighting the war that the terrorists want us to fight.
A misguided invasion of a Muslim country that sparks new insurgencies, ties down our military, busts our budgets, increases the pool of terrorist recruits, alienates America, gives democracy a bad name, and prompts the American people to question our engagement in the world.
Wow.
And in this speech, he also said that if Musharraf doesn't do the right thing over there and clean out these terrorists in the mountainous regions, he's going to go in there and do it himself.
He would invade Pakistan.
Now, the military futility of that is crazy.
They got 39 million military personnel, or 39 million man army in Pakistan.
They've got nuclear weapons.
They have vital, they play a vital role for us.
And if you look at the map of that region, you find that there's no suitable replacement for Pakistan if we alienate them in order to base ourselves for staging operations to resupply troops in Iraq and so forth.
And just from that sense, this is a nonsensical thing.
It shows exactly what Mrs. Clinton claimed Barack Obama is, and that's naive.
This has so much naivete, and he's trying to bulk up here.
He's trying to flex his muscles to demonstrate to everybody just how serious he can be and also make a play for the anti-war left.
What's interesting about this, this whole spat, is the way the media plays this.
Obama says he wants to invade Pakistan.
Well, not really all of Pakistan.
He just wants to go into northwestern Pakistan.
Have you checked to see how that could be done?
You would have to go in from the Arabian Sea.
I think that's the body of water.
Yeah, you'd have to go in from there.
And then you'd have to march.
And by the way, you need lines of communication, by the way, it's been said today.
You need lines of communication to muster such a massive military force.
Pakistan is what provides that now with our flyover rights, staging base operations.
All that would come to a screeching halt if we just invade this sovereign country, which for the most part is an ally.
Almost 170 million people live in Pakistan.
It's a wobbly government.
They got nuclear weapons.
The peace candidate wants to send in troops.
Isn't it amazing how these guys want to lose in Iraq, make up stories about how al-Qaeda was not there?
We know for a fact that the al-Qaeda that is there came in from Pakistan.
They're coming in from Syria.
They're coming in from Iran.
Al-Qaeda is Al-Qaeda.
We know that this Al-Qaeda in Iraq was a phony front group created to make it look like there was a civil war going on there when it's not.
Look, without all the details here, the Obama plan's irrational.
But there is more than meets the eye here.
What do we know?
Well, in the dust up with Hillary, according to the pundits, she won.
But according to the polls, Obama won.
Remember how the pundits, we played soundbites from media people, Chris DeLezi, the Washington Post.
I'm really worried that I may not be seeing things that the rest of the country sees.
It was clear to me that Hillary cleaned up in this debate, but the polls show that the public thought that Obama did.
Now, she has pulled ahead big time nationally.
I mean, a huge jump over last month.
But he is tied with her in New Hampshire and in some polls leads her in South Carolina.
Those are two crucial states.
And national numbers right now don't mean as much as these local state numbers.
So here we have two high-minded politicians with moral compasses who are going absolutely nuts for polling and fundraising.
And no matter how silly or how irresponsible or how inane their words, which Obama's clearly are here today on Pakistan, the drive-bys explain it away.
Well, you know, they don't really mean this.
It's just primary politics.
Here's what Obama's trying to accomplish.
And here's what Hillary's trying to accomplish.
If you had a Republican out there making a statement like this, one of the Republican presidential candidates, I mean, you'd have the drive-bys would be over there with the psychiatrists giving a diagnoses without having seen the patients or anything like that.
You know, we all know what Obama has to do here.
What Obama has to do is be a foil for Hillary.
Obama is there to make it look to us like Hillary can overcome a challenge, and he is playing the role perfectly while thinking, unless he's in on it, while thinking he's distancing himself from her in a more serious way, trying to get over this notion that he is somehow naive.
By the way, ladies and gentlemen, I don't know if you've seen this or not, but a new study has just come out.
And according to this study, the daily commute is not nearly as stressful as we all thought.
We know this because they've taken polls of people who engage in a daily commute.
I have always chosen to live where I don't have a commute.
I have lived my whole life because I think it's important to be focused on work and not get distracted.
After all, my friends, I am a performer.
I have made an effort to live no farther than 15 minutes from work wherever I, well, sometimes in Manhattan, it can take 30 minutes to get to work because of traffic.
But I'm riding there and working in the back of the car while on the way in.
When I drive myself to Sacramento, I live 50 minutes away, here, 15 minutes away.
I have made that an objective.
So the stress thing in commutes, never been a big deal to me anyway.
Hack in a sec.
And we are back serving humanity on our 19th anniversary here at the EIB Network.
Starting our 20th year, let's go to the phones.
We'll start at White Plains, New York.
And oh, by the way, Chris, hang on just a second.
A program note.
Ladies and gentlemen, I will not be behind the Golden EIB microphone tomorrow because, and it's not a vacation day.
It's not a golf outing.
It's a super secret meeting in a faraway place necessitating my absence.
Paul W. Smith from WJR Detroit will be here tomorrow, but we will be back on Friday.
All right, Chris in White Plains, thank you for waiting and welcome to the EIB network.
First Rush, congratulations on the most wonderful, at least 15 years I've been listening to you, 19 years you've been around.
Congratulations.
Thank you, sir, very much.
I appreciate that.
And actually, this is a double fantastic day besides me getting on to you, is that Mr. Murdoch, I have heard, won his bid for the Down Jones, which means that now with the Wall Street Journal in competition, we might be able to kiss the New York Times bye-bye.
Well, it's going to be a tough thing to do, but you are very, very shrewd, sir, in your assessment.
I read this morning that in an interview in 2005, Rupert Murdoch was asked about the New York Times, and he said, you know, the problem with the New York Times is not really the New York Times.
It's the rest of the media.
The rest of the media adopts the New York Times agenda.
Whatever is on the front page of the New York Times is what television cable news networks decide is news.
At least the networks, CBS, NBC, CBS, the liberal networks.
The New York Times always was.
That's why it was called a paper of record.
Stories on the front page throughout the front section determined what the agenda.
In fact, when I moved to Sacramento, this is the first time I learned this.
When I moved to Sacramento in 1984 to begin the program there that eventually became this program, the news director out there, consultant actually, who had hired me, was also consulting the station.
And I remember my first day there, he went strolling through the newsroom one morning, and all he found was the Los Angeles Times, the Sacramento Bee, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
He blew up.
He started to shut up, where's the New York Times?
You can't do news anymore without the New York Times.
The newsroom had to have the New York Times because the New York Times set the agenda.
So Murdoch was making this point.
He said, that means that there is a whole market out there for a different way to do news and treat news.
And he started talking in this interview in 2005 about the Wall Street Journal having the infrastructure in place to do that.
So I have, you're very shrewd, sir.
You may know more than you've let on because I think one of the objectives that Murdoch has is to take on the New York Times as the paper of record.
He's not going to tamper with the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.
I have no idea what he's going to do with the rest of the paper.
He signed all these agreements with the Bancroft family, but I mean, what's that worth?
He owns the paper.
You're not going to buy something and say, I'm not going to run it the way I want to.
He's not going to spend $5 billion for that.
He'll give it time.
He'll let all, you know, the unions inside the Wall Street Journal are having a cow right now.
The New York Times are having a cow.
The rest of the drive-bys are having a cow.
I'll give you some examples here as the program unfolds, some of the headlines, some of the stories.
They're all worried what he's going to do to this venerable institution.
Oh, no, how will he destroy it?
And of course, if these people were honest, if they really think he's going to destroy the journal, they'd be happy, wouldn't they?
Isn't the news like any other business?
Isn't it competitive?
Aren't they losing circulation?
Aren't they losing ad dollars?
Wouldn't it be great for them if Murdoch came in and blew it and ran the Wall Street Journal into the ground?
That's what they actually ought to be hoping for.
What they're really afraid of is that he can come in, and this is just another chink in the once existing monopoly that the left had.
They are simply afraid of Rupert Murdoch because he's conservative for the most part, and he succeeds.
And he's going to be stiff competition.
You know, when you have a monopoly, you don't have to compete.
When you have a monopoly, you can do whatever you want.
You can sit around and not do anything.
You can work two hours a day, do whatever you want to do.
When there's nobody to compete with you, it doesn't matter.
It's like the government.
If the government provides a service, and if they're the only one that does, like they want to be with health care like the Democrats do, where else are you going to go?
When you have to stand in line, when you have to pay whatever they charge, even though it's free, where else are you going to go if there's no alternative?
Same thing with the news business.
If you've got a monopoly, everything's cool.
Take your time.
Make sure the Republicans never have more than 150 members in the House of Representatives.
Give them a president now and then, but you can still manage them.
All those days are gone now.
And the liberals from the drive-by media all the way into the hallowed halls of Congress and state legislatures are still a Twitter over what's happened.
And now this Murdoch purchase of the Wall Street Journal with what I think is going to be a concerted attempt to replace the New York Times as the paper of record.
By the way, he also acknowledges it's going to be expensive.
You're going to have to have worldwide bureaus, journalists all over the world to pull this off.
But I think he's got a grandiose idea.
Plus, he's got his new business channel starting on cable, Fox Business Channel.
And he's going to brand that with the Wall Street Journal.
They've got a 12-year exclusive deal with CNBC, but hell, anything can be broken with enough money.
Or partner up with them.
You know, what the hell?
CNBC is going to be the primary competition of the Fox business channel, but it's exciting.
And the drive-bys are all a Twitter.
Here's Ron, Bend Oregon.
You're next on the EIB network, sir.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
Hey.
Do you remember how you've told us how Ronaldo Magnus destroyed the Soviet Empire?
Ronaldos Magnus, yes.
I remember that very well.
He destroyed the Soviet Empire because they ruined their army in Afghanistan and they broke their budget trying to keep up with our arms program.
Yes.
Osama bin Laden's aim is for us to break our budget and ruin our army in Iraq.
And that's the trap we're falling into.
And listen, this is not, if it is World War II, we need the money and the troops to fight it.
If it's not World War II, if this is the new kind of what they call fourth-generation war.
Wait, I have a question.
Okay.
It's a hypothetical.
We're not fighting this the right way.
We're going to wreck in our army.
No, no, my question is not hypothetical.
Do you mean to say, moments ago at the beginning of your phone call on this program that Osama bin Laden lured us into Iraq for the express purposes of having us destroy and break our army?
He hoped we would get tangled up in Afghanistan.
Instead, he was beaten there.
Then we went into Iraq, and there is nothing he likes better than us staying in Iraq.
Do you know next April, the Army either has to extend tours to 18 months or do something else because we don't have enough soldiers?
I don't think that that's accurate.
I don't think bin Laden's happy about what's going on, if he's even still alive.
I don't think Zawahir thinks these guys are happy about what's going on at all.
They're being wiped out in Iraq and they're being pushed out by native Iraqis.
The trend has started to occur.
Our military, by the way, you'd have to grant this.
Our military is a little bit higher stature and caliber than what the Soviet Union's was.
That's true.
But the strain is great.
The number of troops is not what it should be.
We talked about this a couple of years ago, and they're not yet beginning to increase the size of the Army and the Marine Corps.
And that's where the loss is, and that's where the fighting is, the Army and the Marine Corps, not Air Force fighter jets and Navy carriers.
I'm reading that they're meeting their recruitment goals overall.
Not for the last two months, Rush.
And the guys that are in the middle of the year.
They might be down a little bit, but so far they're on schedule to meet their yearly goals.
You're going to have ups and downs month to month.
You start analyzing it that way.
You can say anything's failing.
Rush, can I suggest one more thing?
Well, go right ahead.
In case we never talk again.
Rush, have you ever thought about this?
If this new thing in Iraq is as big a catastrophe as it portends to be, you may be helping ruin the Republican Party for the next 30 or 40 years.
Have you thought about that?
No.
Maybe will they not be a Republican president for the next 30 years?
Oh, I think that's entirely possible, but not because of Iraq and not because of me.
There's a clear way Republicans can win the White House.
There's a clear way that Republicans can win elections.
And if they abandon it, if the candidates running for these offices abandon it, there's nothing anybody else can do to save them.
But I don't think it's going to be a, I don't think it's going to be a 30-year drought.
I'm not even sure it's going to be a drought.
I'm not conceding that the Democrats win 08.
I'll tell you, for all the problems the Republicans have, I would not, the Democrats, I don't think they have a clue how silly they look, how dangerous they appear, how incompetent, and that's a key word, and how corrupt they are appearing.
They live by polls and focus groups that their own activists and pollsters take, and the drive-bys do puff-piece stories on them.
I don't think they really have an idea of what the general population is beginning to think of them of the way they're conducting themselves.
This earmarks bill, this ethics bill, I tell you, it's going to cause national outrage when people find out about this.
This is one of the reasons the Republicans lost in 06.
It wasn't Iraq that the Republicans lost in 06 for.
It was the appearance of corruption and insulation from the people, a bit of arrogance thrown in, and the Democrats are heading right down that road again.
I'll get to that when we get back through this break, which we have to take now.
We'll continue here shortly after this.
And we are back.
Rush Limbaugh, America's real anchorman, a national treasure, Nobel Peace Prize nominee, general all-round good guy, starting our 20th year of service to America and the world on the EIB network today.
Rich Galen in his Mullings blog has some interesting statistics today, and everybody's looking at fundraising just within the confines of the presidential race.
And of course, in the presidential race, the Democrat candidates are shellacking the Republican candidates in fundraising.
However, you may not know that the committee level, the National Committee level, the Republican National Committee is kicking the DNC's wallet pocket.
In the month of June, the RNC raised about $6.4 million for the month.
The DNC raised about $4.1 million for June.
So what?
Well, the Republicans had a short spurt, which got them a couple million more in June.
So this, if you look at fundraising for the cycle, the RNC has outraised the DNC about $45 million to about $28 million, a fundraising edge of about $17 million.
And then there's the ever-important cash on hand number.
Howard Dean and his DNC enters the second half of 2007 with cash on hand at touch under $5 million.
The GOP goes into the second half with cash on hand of nearly $16 million.
This is not being reported.
It's no mystery as to why.
The picture, the template is Republicans are being abandoned by their ardent supporters.
Republicans have no hope.
It's over.
We may as well just crown the Democrats and whoever they nominate president after their primaries because the Republicans don't have a chance.
Look at the fundraising, but it's not exactly that way.
Washington Journal today, Tom Coburn, was on C-SPAN for 30 minutes.
And the callers were just in righteous indignation over, and bipartisan, too.
Republican and Democrat line callers were just in righteous indignation over this ethics and reform bill that is proving to be one of the biggest shams in the Democrat Congress.
Let me read you some experts here from the Journal, a Wall Street Journal's editorial entitled Earmarks as Usual.
It's almost too stereotypical to be true.
Even as the FBI and the IRS raided the home of Ted Stevens this week as part of a corruption investigation, Congress is quietly moving to dismantle serious earmark reform.
If the members are wondering why their approval ratings have gone subterranean, this is it.
Not that they've had a time for soul-searching amid all their self-congratulation over yesterday's passage of the Ethics and Lobbying Bill 411 to 8.
By the way, the Ethics and Lobbying Bill eliminates $200 lunches, but permits $27 million earmarks and even more.
It gets rid of so-called influence from lobbyists, but it's a sham.
And it was 411 to 8.
Republicans and Democrats alike are bragging that they've now banned such occasions of sin as having lunch with a lobbyist or traveling on a corporate jet.
Only Congress people can take pride in claiming that they can be corrupted by a free lunch.
Yeah, we've been corrupted by a lunch.
Corrupted on a plane flight, but we're no longer going to be corrupted now because those people can't give us things.
What fools do they take us for?
These ethics reforms do less to limit the members than they do to limit the ability of voters to influence their elected representatives.
As for members of Congress restraining themselves, they once promised more transparency and limits for the pork barrel projects known as earmarks.
These secret spending handouts have proliferated in recent years, and in 2005 alone cost taxpayers some $27 billion.
Worse, they're a kind of gateway drug used to buy votes for even greater spending.
As the last unlamented Republican Congress showed all too well, earmarks are also major opportunities for corruption.
The current investigation at Ted Stevens centers on whether he may have directed millions in earmarks to benefit family, friends, and business partners.
He says he's got nothing to hide.
As I said yesterday, where's the raid in Searchlight, Nevada?
Where's the rage in raid in Pennsylvania where Mirtha hangs out?
Talking about earmarks.
Now, you people all loathe this.
We all loathe this way of doing business.
Democrats did well in their campaign last year because they said they were going to end this earmark status quo.
They're going to get rid of this.
They're a culture of corruption the Republicans had read they were going to get rid of.
The public embarrassment also allowed Republican senators Jim DeMitt and Tob Coburn to shame Harry Reid into agreeing to meaningful reform in January.
But when the final reform emerged from congressional backrooms last week, any serious reform had vanished.
Reed and Pelosi proceeded to bring the bill to the floor in a fast-track procedure that's avoided public scrutiny and limited the ability of reformers to offer amendments to restore the cuts.
So basically, earmarks are thriving.
They are alive and well.
But you are supposed to be bought off with the notion that you and your congressmen can no longer go have lunch that you pay for.
Your Congress is now above corruption.
Your senator is above corruption, ladies, because he can't be bought by having lunch with you or a lobbyist or flying on some plane.
Favorites, well, let me take a quick timeout here to make sure I don't.
We got a new clock here that we're trying to a format clock.
I won't bore you with the details, but I don't know where I am in it anymore.
All right, now you may be curious that this so-called ethics reform bill, which preserves these earmarks that just eliminates these $200 lunches, why did it end up passing 411 to 8, you say?
Where are the Republicans on this?
Folks, they were afraid to vote against anything that had the word ethics in it.
They were just afraid.
And plus, you know, some of them want their, they want the earmarks.
This is how these guys stay in office is they have, they buy votes with these.
They trade votes for earmarks amongst themselves on the floor and with voters.
By the way, you know what?
This ethics reform, it will even allow members of Congress to accept all the free lunches they want from lobbyists, even though they've been banned.
But the provision is those meals have to be classified as campaign events.
So if a lobbyist wants to take a member of Congress to lunch, he still can, and he can pay for it.
It just has to be called a fundraiser.
I mean, if people find out what really is in this thing, you couple this with what happened on illegal immigration, you couple this with the anger people already felt over earmarks and all these pork projects in the November 6 elections, and nobody up there is going to be safe.
This is a full-fledged backroom secret deal that is insulting to your intelligence.
They think you're never going to find out about this.
We'll be back.
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