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Aug. 31, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:58
August 31, 2007, Friday, Hour #2
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Well, thank you once again.
It is great to be here filling in for Rush.
I tell you, filling in for Rush is a little bit like being Jaja Gabor's eighth husband on their honeymoon.
You kind of know what you're supposed to do.
You're just wondering if you can make it interesting.
I don't know.
You think about it.
1-800-282-2882.
I am Jason Lewis filling in for the great one, Rush Limbaugh, who I would say right about now is on the 14th T, probably Snerdley, HR, probably what, 2-300 par by now?
14th T, 2,300.
That's Rush pretty much scratch.
I guess.
Just tell him when he comes back, tell him I said that.
I think Rush is a scratch golfer.
There, it's out.
It's true.
Scott from Texas got this Iraq thing going again, and there's a survey out now from Zogby that most Americans say Iraq war is not lost.
That's right.
A majority of Americans, 54%, believe the United States has not lost the war.
A third of Democrats don't think the war is lost.
So why do we keep getting from the institutional media this notion that all is lost, that Iraq is a failure?
Well, there's one group that I know of that definitely doesn't think Iraq is lost, and they should know.
They've been there, most of them.
It's called Vets for Freedom.
They're running some great ads, and I personally know the guy that's working hard to get this group more exposure, and his name is Pete Hegseth, and he joins us now.
Pete, welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program with Jason Lewis.
Jason, thanks for having me.
Good to talk with you, my friend.
You're stationed now.
You were in Iraq, of course, but stationed now in New York City.
Which one is more dangerous?
Well, on a political level, I'm going to have to say New York.
Yeah, to be sure.
Listen, Vets for Freedom is long overdue because every time some disgruntled ex-Iraq vet or a lifelong military man comes out, and God bless them, freedom of speech and all of that.
But every time they come out against the war, they get 24-7 coverage.
Your group, Vets for Freedom, is designed to put forth the other view that guess what?
The majority of vets and most people in the military think this is a good idea.
It's winnable, and we are winning.
You're absolutely right.
I mean, we exist to elevate the voice of that vast majority of veterans who believe in the mission.
They've been there.
They've seen how it can succeed.
And they've also seen the dangers of failing and what is at stake in Iraq.
And they understand that.
So we exist to elevate that powerful story of that day-to-day grind that goes on in Iraq and how these guys are making progress.
And, you know, we're just fortunate enough to have had some success.
And you know why we're having success?
Because the guys on the ground in Iraq have adjusted their strategy.
They're doing it right.
They're making progress every day.
The surge is working.
And we're just here to amplify that.
What was not done right?
I mean, debathification, I believe, was a mistake.
What else was not done right at the outset?
Sure.
I think we were slow to adapt to realities on the ground.
That we had a conventional military using conventional tactics, trying to fight an asymmetrical, unconventional war.
And when those didn't work, we were slow to adapt as a military and as the Pentagon and other institutions.
And we're finally now shifted into fighting a counterinsurgency toward protecting the population.
In the past, we tried to just have elections and quickly prop up an Iraqi army and police and then draw back without ever providing the security conditions that are so necessary for political progress.
You see, that's what Petraeus understands, that you can't have benchmarks or political progress without secure streets.
And that's what he's doing right now with the Russia.
Yeah, I want to talk about Petraeus because there's a move afoot to already delegitimize what he's going to say in September.
But let me talk about the Shia influence there, Maliki and company, and the current government.
And that is some people say the security forces there are still dominated by Shias who are engaged in some very nasty behavior.
Is that what you saw?
Is that what you're hearing from Iraq?
Well, I mean, in certain areas, there's no doubt that there's been infiltration into a lot of the Shia police networks.
But that's something that Petraeus is certainly dealing with.
And One way you can affect that is by standing up local institutions, local police forces.
If you look at Anbar province, they're not deploying Shia policemen into Anbar to police the streets.
They've got local Sunnis there signing up for the police force en masse to secure their own neighborhoods.
I think that's an important development in removing the sectarian element.
And General Petraeus, I think, has identified what police commanders have been corrupt, they've been removed, and they're doing everything they can to build a professional force.
I think if you really take a hard look at the Iraqi army there, it has improved a great deal.
It's taking over much more responsibility in Baghdad, and it's because Americans have set the conditions for them to do so.
And as I say, the Petraeus report coming up next month is already being preempted, if you will, by those who are saying, well, he's just going to take directions from the White House, this or that.
You know about General Petraeus.
Tell the listeners about him.
Well, General Petraeus, he's been on the lead in Iraq the entire time.
He led the entire time.
He led the 101st into Iraq in 2003.
He did his best to train the Iraqi security forces, then came back and wrote the counterinsurgency manual that he's now applying in Baghdad.
He is the best and the brightest that the American military has to offer.
And his principles and what he's applying in Baghdad are working.
I mean, what happened after three and a half years is the best ideas within the institution have come to the fore.
And General Petraeus and his counterinsurgency strategy of protecting the population are having great success.
So while it may be far in coming and way too long in coming, we finally do have the right leadership with the right strategy.
We are winning.
We are moving in that direction.
And Americans, they want a winning strategy.
And that's when you referred to that poll of a majority of Americans believing that it's not lost.
It's because Americans want to win, Jason.
But they need to see a winning strategy, and they haven't seen one.
And now they're seeing one, and they're turning around.
And we're just doing everything we can to amplify that.
The double standard on the part of the opponents is deafening, too.
You've got these guys saying the war is lost, Harry Reid, Representative James Moran, all these people.
And yet, they can't muster the votes in Congress for immediate withdrawal because they know what happened after April 1975 in Saigon when we left all of those people in the killing fields.
Millions died.
Tens of thousands were put in prison camps.
You know, I have a different view of the Vietnam War.
You're just a kid.
I was a lot of fun before electricity, let me tell you.
The point here is we lost that battle, but we won the Cold War.
And anybody that thinks surrendering doesn't have ramifications, ask the Vietnamese, ask the Cambodians.
And then the Soviets were on the march in Mozambique, in Afghanistan, in Angola, in Central America in the late 1970s when our foreign policy was weak and vacillating.
Thank you, Jimmy Carter.
So you can sit here and criticize the Iraq conflict, and I've been critical of it as well.
But you better have an alternative solution because we know what would happen in a vacuum.
And you know what?
I don't hear any alternative solutions from Harry Reid or James Moran or all these people that say the war is lost and then go visit the troops and can't figure out why the troops are turning their cheek to them.
It's exactly right.
And when they come back, they say, you know what?
And the House Majority Whip, James Clyburn, said it would be a real big problem for congressional Democrats if a positive report came back, if things improve.
I mean, we've got a segment of the country.
That was a signal to the mainstream media, by the way.
That was a signal to the mainstream media.
We better do something about Petraeus, and we better do it now.
Yeah.
When you've got a segment so infested in defeat, it can be a difficult obstacle to get around.
But there are also good signs in Pakistan.
I have been more critical of Musharraf than some others.
And now if you've got the former leader coming back, Bhutto, and a few others, and you've got him supposedly, allegedly getting ready to step down from his army post, and you can join the moderate forces or the more secular forces there with Musharraf and fight that extremism in Pakistan, which absolutely has to be done, has to be fought, that might be a good sign, too.
Absolutely.
I think we have to do everything we can to empower the forces of moderation, which is what makes Iraq so important.
When you referred to Vietnam and the fallout, the fallout of Iraq, of a failed state, of a defeat, it would be incredible.
And you understand that, Jason?
The jihadists that we're facing seek not only to destroy us on some level or another, but to impose their will on the populations of their own country and of that region.
So we're dealing with a radical ideology that wants to spread and is looking to Iraq as the central front.
And what we're doing to defeat al-Qaeda and radical Shia-Iranian-backed elements is going to have a huge impact on what that region looks like and what America's interests are in the future.
I'll be honest with you, though.
I'm not one of those that thinks we can militarily march into Iran.
We don't have the troops.
I mean, you can do it maybe if you reinstate the draft, thanks to Barney Frank.
But I, like Reagan and Andrew Jackson, am opposed to that.
I do think, however, we can look at Iran like we looked at Eastern Europe and fight it that way, fight it with all sorts of powers and rhetorical powers and radio free this and radio free that and supporting the dissidents in Iran and keeping the economic sanctions on, the pressure that way, because you're right, a lot of it's stemming from there.
But frankly, a lot of it's stemming from all over the region.
Sure.
Yeah, I mean, we've got insurgents flowing into Iraq from Syria.
You know, when I was in Samara, we had, you know, there was plenty of Saudi folks from Saudi Arabia instigating the al-Qaeda violence there.
So there's a lot of countries, including Iran, invested in the outcome in Iraq, which is what makes it so important to ensure that we do not leave a haven behind.
We don't allow radical elements to take control of the country.
Pete Hegseth from Vets for Freedom, you've got some great commercials running right now and some very moving ones.
Keep up the great work.
If people want to find more about Vets for Freedom, where do they go?
They can go to VetsForFreedom.org.
Our ads are on there.
And then there's also some more great ads on freedomswatch.org.
They've been running some with Iraq veterans as well.
Always good to talk with you, my friend.
Thank you, Jason.
You'll be well.
I'm Jason Lewis in for the great one Rush Limbaugh today on Open Line Friday.
Back after this.
All right.
Our thanks once again to Pete Hegseth and Vets for Freedom.
Great group.
Check it out.
Jason Lewis back here atop the EIB building in Midtown Manhattan, in for the great one Rush Limbaugh today.
Rush will be back on Tuesday.
Best of Rush on Monday.
A well-deserved break for the king of all radio.
Tony Snow announced his resignation today, resigning, I believe, immediately.
No, it's September 14th, I think it was.
Yeah, anyway, he's going.
And the beleaguered snow, health-wise, anyway, we wish him the best.
Great guy.
Had a chance to meet Tony once or twice.
Very, very nice man.
The White House press secretary.
He's announcing his resignation today.
Tries to, we'll do some other things.
He's vague about his future right now.
But I go back to an article Tony Snow wrote.
And we just got done talking a little bit about Iraq.
And there was this myth out there that Bush and the Republicans are in trouble because of Iraq.
Would that it were true.
There's nothing to back that up.
I'll tell you why, quite frankly, the Republicans are in trouble, the Republican Congress, and to a lesser degree, the administration, and that is spending's up 50% in the last five years.
Gerald Ford, in two and a half years, had 66 vetoes.
We've had about one or two in the last five or six years.
The GOP-controlled Senate, when they had control, failed to act on cutting the estate tax or making the estate tax reductions permanent, making the Bush tax cuts permanent, reforming the AMT, better yet, abolishing the outrageous alternative minimum tax, drilling in Nanoir, giving the president the line item veto, welfare reform to the gang of 14 and immigration.
The Republicans failed to act on that.
That's why they're in trouble.
Tony Snow wrote in a column back in 2005 that a number of administration insiders had begun boasting about big government conservatism, oblivious to the fact that, quote, big government does not conserve nor preserve.
It crushes and digests devouring institutions that challenge its supremacy.
You want an example or a manifestation of that?
You want to know why the Republicans are in a bit of trouble after Row 6?
And why the culling of some of these Republicans who resign or quit or get defeated isn't necessarily a bad thing if we can get more Reaganite conservatives to take their place?
Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson in Newsweek earlier this year bemoaned the fact that the anti-government types have, quote, an unhealthy disdain for government, a reflexive preference for markets, and an unbalanced emphasis on individual choice, close quote.
This was a former speechwriter to the president writing in Newsweek that anti-government types, certainly I hope he wasn't talking about the gipper, have quote, an unhealthy disdain for government, a reflexive preference for markets, and an unbalanced emphasis on individual choice, close quote.
That is precisely what the GOP ought to be standing for.
We have a National Socialist Party.
It's the Democrat.
We need to be the capitalist party.
And once we rediscover those virtues, and once we go back to a Reaganite vision, remember Reagan ran on limiting government, on promoting growth.
Actually, Reagan ran on tuition tax credits and abolishing the Department of Education.
There wasn't any no child left behind, which has now turned into no tragedy left behind for Democrats, exploiting every misfortune.
But I digress.
The point here is it has nothing to do with Iraq.
The Republicans became too comfortable with power.
They started governing like Democrats, and that's when the base got demoralized.
And that's what's going to have to change to get the base energized again.
By the way, speaking of that, Fred Thompson is almost in.
He's going to announce his candidacy coming up, what, let's see, September, well, it's early next week, I believe it is.
I don't have the article right in front of me, but Fred Thompson is effectively in.
So, what's fascinating, and I'm not endorsing any candidate on the Rush Limbaugh show, wouldn't have dream of doing that.
What is fascinating, though, is why is Thompson getting these poll numbers before he even announces?
Because a lot of the faithful, a lot of the Republican base has been, well, they're demoralized.
They've been taken down this road too long, and they're very skeptical of any of the candidates.
And that's because of moderation.
That's because they listen to the consultants say, you've got to move to the center.
You know, the center is precisely where that skunk in the road was when I hit him last week.
1-800-282-2882.
I'm Jason Lewis in for Rush up in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Ernie, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Thank you for taking my call.
Sure.
I'm a four and a half year veteran of the firing Korean war.
God bless you, sir.
And though I'm up way up in my 70s, I happen to have a young son who was in a Marine, who was in Iraq in the beginning.
What I want to say is that the media, when they talk about the conflict this country's gone through, they go from World War II when they slide into Vietnam.
In Korea, we lost as many men.
Listen, as many men as we lost in Vietnam in one-third the time, the fighting was three times as intense.
The 1950 class at West Point had the highest casualty rate of any class in any war in the 20th century, 34%.
And to be labeled a forgotten war is totally outrageous, and it sticks in my claw all these years because of, you know.
Well, it's worse than that.
Some on the hard left label it a lost effort, a wasted effort.
Let me tell you something.
When you look at these policies of containment, whether it's Korea, which did have some containment, or Vietnam, which eventually folded, they helped win the Cold War.
Listen, can I say one other thing?
You sure can.
I had, like I say, because I'm in my late 70s, but I happen to have a young son who's a Marine, and one of the things that's not being publicized in the media at all is the extreme high suicide rate of the military in Iraq.
And that's being swept under the rug.
It's highest suicide rate in any war.
And, you know, this whole thing is totally out of control.
Well, that's what they said about Korea.
Did you agree with that?
Well, I don't know what the suicide rate was in Korea.
No, I'm not talking about the suicide rate.
I'm talking about the critics of that conflict.
But long before Pamoon John, they were saying out of control.
It's hurting people.
Do you agree with that?
Sure, it's hurting people.
And we're still there.
Do you think it was true?
Look, Michael.
Are we going to be in Iraq in another 50 years?
We'll do what it takes to win.
I mean, I'm tired of these timetables.
Are you going to say, well, it's just too difficult?
Let's just fold.
Let's just draw into this sort of neo-isolationist foreign policy and the world will be right.
At what point do you say there's a clear and present danger, a national security threat, after 3,000 people perish in downtown Manhattan?
I mean, let me say this.
A couple of years ago, a year and a half ago, when the Marines had a problem in Fallujah, why didn't we go in and drop leaflets and say, and leaflets had said to the people, you know, vacate the land and they're going to come in and we're going to do saturation bombing.
They did nothing.
And the Marines took a beating.
You know, in Korea, when they retreated from Chosen Reservoir to the province of Hunan, the port of Hunan, there was a failed Napalm drop and it landed on the Marines.
And the Marines in the perimeter were shooting their own men because they couldn't get in to save them.
And that's fact.
And, you know, this whole thing about trying to, quote-unquote, America save the world, it's just not going to work.
Well, I will tell you something, my friend, and I got to let you go, but I thank God for the troops in Korea and Vietnam.
I thank God for Grenada.
I thank God for the Contras.
And I thank God for everybody that persevered after a long, long twilight struggle after Roosevelt gave away Eastern Europe to Stalin, who turned out to be an even more formidable enemy.
And then, against the Democrats, you know, trying to vacillate and their weakness, we persevered.
And, you know, in 1989, thanks to the Gipper, you know, not to mention the opponents there, we won the Cold War.
Now, we may have had a lot of ugly battles, but in the final analysis, we stopped Soviet expansionism, which killed anywhere from 10 to 20 to 30 million, depending on which chapter you read in the black book of communism.
So I'm tired of the apologists for this pacifism.
These are worthy and noble efforts, and we won.
And if we persevere, we will do the same thing in this country.
You know, God bless Ernie and everybody who's fought in foreign wars or any particular war, and I don't want to traumatize too many liberals, but I hate to break this to you, gang.
Rob Reiner did not win the Cold War.
You got all these revisionists running around saying, we were right on Vietnam.
We were right on.
You know, after, since Vietnam, I wonder if there's any aspect of military projection by America that these guys would support.
I mean, you did, they didn't support the Reagan buildup.
They didn't support deploying the Pershings in Europe.
They didn't support SDI.
They didn't support Grenada.
Jimmy Carter wouldn't support the Contras.
I mean, Sandinistas took over.
Remember what happened after Vietnam.
After April 1975, when that horrific picture of the helicopter leaving the embassy in Saigon and people clinging to it, the Soviets were on the march everywhere.
In Angola, Mozambique, Afghanistan, Central America, you name it.
And what happened?
Well, when we pulled out of Vietnam, that sent a signal.
Now, it wasn't the final signal.
Fortunately, thanks to Ronald Reagan, I'll be blunt, thanks to Ronald Reagan, we defeated the Soviets because he knew their economic system couldn't match SDI.
And the proudest moment in my adult life was when Reagan walked out of Reykjavik in Iceland and had that stern look on his face.
And Gorbachev says, well, if you just give up SDI, we'll do the zero option and all of that.
And Reagan, against the advice of all the State Department diplomats at Foggy Bottom, said, no, not going to do it.
I remember the Gibber watching that.
He just said one of the little cog of his head and just, well, well, no.
You know, that was it.
And guess what?
Later on, after the Berlin Wall went down and the Soviets opened up Glasnost, they said, yeah, we couldn't keep up with SDI.
He was right.
Our economy, centrally planned economies, you know, they never work, folks.
They never work.
As Hayek and others have said, you can't possibly guess what thousands, millions of entrepreneurs want to produce, what millions of consumers want.
There is no market discipline.
There is no invisible hand in a centrally planned economy.
And that's why they can never keep up.
When you harness back that incentive to produce, when you harness back capital or ratchet it back, you get less production.
And there's only one thing that counts in economics, and that's production.
It's not redistribution of wealth, it's production.
Because without that, you'll have nothing to redistribute.
Anyway, I could go on for hours on this, but I won't because it's Open Line Friday in Lawrence, Kansas.
Hank, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Jason Lewis.
Hi.
Jason, first, I just want to salute you and thank you for your efforts.
I am a retired Marine.
I served for 21 years.
In 1984, I was a part of the counterinsurgency, counterintelligence program that was going on down based out of Panama.
So I saw intimately what was going on in that world in Central America.
I'm a huge fan of Reagan.
You mean the Ortega brothers didn't have our best interests at heart?
I'm telling you, everybody that's wet behind that, I was a 2674, which is a Spanish cryptologic linguist.
My wife is a Panamanian that has since become an American citizen.
And we were absolutely right in what we were doing.
And we made so much progress down there as a part of Reagan and a part of conservative ideology and thinking.
There's a reason why they called him Cabeza de Mani, referring to Jimmy Carter as peanut head, because he had no clue of what he was doing and the damage that was caused because of his politics.
I remember Jimmy Carter's human rights policy.
It was said, we are not going to trade, do business with any country that hasn't adopted the very definition of quote-unquote human rights that Jimmy Carter thought was proper.
So we were punishing countries who were our allies.
I mean, really, let's be blunt about this.
And I'm not going to sit here and defend the Shah of Iran.
But if you want to talk about the rising Shia Crescent in that part of the country, it started after the fall of the Shah of Iran.
And who engineered that?
So, I mean, you've got a point.
I absolutely support you.
I want to let you know here, my phone's getting ready to die, but I support the Veterans for Freedom.
You bet.
I'm a retired Marine, like I said.
My company, Devil Dog Brew, supports the military, and we're doing something special for the vets that are over there and the active duty members that are serving in Iraq.
Good for you, Hank.
Thank you for your time on the radio.
Well, thank you, sir, and thanks for the call, and thanks for your service, by the way.
And, you know, talking about the Sandinistas in Nicaragua or Castro in Cuba, who's lauded.
I remember there was a journalism survey at Columbia University years ago, and you had these future journalists, students, who held Fidel Castro in higher esteem than Ronald Reagan.
There was a survey.
It kind of tells you all you need to know about the mainstream media.
And it's ironic, too, because the first thing these tyrants do, especially the totalitarians on the left, is what?
Shut down the press in Cuba, in Nicaragua, and now Chavez, who's expropriating private property and shutting down the press.
And by the way, making himself a president with only, I can only serve 40 terms.
After that, I'm out of here.
I don't care what you say.
40 is it for me.
It's remarkable the double standard again on totalitarian regimes from the quote-unquote left versus the quote-unquote right.
And there is no difference.
There's only tyranny and freedom.
It doesn't matter whether it's Stalin or Hitler in the final analysis.
Stalin may have killed more than Hitler.
I mean, if you talk about the, I mean, all go get the black book of communism.
You really ought to read that because you're not going to see that in the newsprint.
Because for one reason or another, the liberal left has this love affair, this fascination with totalitarianism if it's done by a commie.
Very odd.
You don't see an outrage over Hugo Chavez, except in the mind of Pat Robertson.
But I'm not going to go there.
Steve, in Tampa, Florida, you're on the Jason Lewis show.
Hi.
Or, excuse me, the Rush Limbaugh program with Jason Lewis filling in.
Yeah.
You know, I lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa for five years.
I got a call from a friend yesterday that lives in Bettendorf and said, you wouldn't believe what a judge did in Iowa with the gay marriage thing.
And my argument as a conservative Republican and the base is demoralized right now.
Is there a better argument to elect a conservative in 2008 just for federal judges alone?
And I realize this was a state judge, but I mean, what they can't accomplish at the ballot box, they want to do through the judiciary.
Yeah, you're right.
And that's where Bush has really, really done well.
I mean, Harriet Meyer is notwithstanding.
You've got some quality judges he's appointed.
And look, people always ask me, Jason, what is originalism?
What is strict constructionism?
What is this adherence that we want from our judges?
It's quite simple.
It's an adherence to legislative deference.
It's an adherence to enumerated powers.
And it's an adherence to state prerogative or federalism.
That's it.
And what does that mean?
It means enumerated powers doctrine, which everybody's forgotten when you talk about federal smoking bans for crying out loud, is the notion that we have all the rights.
We give the federal government the power to do certain things.
And guess what?
We enumerated those in the federal document.
If it isn't in the Constitution, here's a novel idea for John Edwards.
They can't do it.
And yet you get activist judges who read all sorts of things in the Ninth Amendment, in the Due Process Clause, in the Equal Protection Clause, trying to read things into the Constitution that simply isn't there.
A federal ban on smoking is not, is not constitutional, period.
In fact, I'll give you an example, Steve.
At least when they tried to do the misguided prohibition, they were intellectually honest enough to say, well, we've got to amend the Constitution because there is no federal power to ban alcohol.
Now it's just, we'll get a judge to uphold a federal ban on smoking or anything else.
And so what we've lost here, I should say, is the notion that judges should stay out of things that are public policy matters.
They interpret laws.
That's about it.
So the notion of legislative deference says if the citizens of Iowa want gay marriage, they need to go to the legislature and pass a law.
And if they don't, and they prohibit it, just like they prohibit prostitution, they prohibit, you know, you talk about privacy rights and all of this nonsense.
Where is the privacy rights in the myriad of usury laws?
You know what a usury law is?
It says if I want to loan you money, I can only do it at a certain interest rate.
If I go higher, I'm a loan shark.
Now, that's private.
That's a private transaction between you and me, is it not?
And you know what?
If you look at the people of Pakistan, they would never, they would never amend their Constitution to allow gay marriage.
Never.
Never in a million years.
Now, here's, by the way, let me interrupt you for just a second.
Let's connect the dot here.
Let's bring this full circle.
You know, Bush has been good on judges.
Most of the Republican faithful believe what you believe.
But then you had the specter of Messrs. Lindsey Graham, the John McCain wannabe of South Carolina, and John McCain trying to do what?
They almost, with a gang of 14, almost filibustered the good Bush judges.
Now, you talk about demoralizing the base.
There you have it.
Oh, and that is that you know, I Ronald Reagan is absolutely my idol.
When George W. Bush was elected, I was very, very hopeful.
But you just see some things.
It's bad.
It's immigration.
It's so many things.
And it's not Iraq.
And it's not Iraq.
Can I say one thing on Iraq?
And the highest honor I ever had was getting invited to a Marines commissioning.
You know, I would love for the president and for others to make the argument that, you know, I don't know what the exact numbers were, but how many people did we lose for the Battle of Normandy?
We lost a lot of troops, and it was worth it.
And you know what?
You know, you lose one troop.
We were losing the war.
There were a number of times where we were losing the war, and it could have gone either way had it not been for this or that.
So, yes, if we had the same sort of weakness and vacillation now, I remember who was the famous World War II reporter?
Was it Ernie Pyle?
Was that right?
I can't remember H.R., but I think it was Ernie Powell.
But he used to send reports back to the domestic press talking about, our boys had a good day today.
Our boys took the hill.
Can you imagine any reporter today referring in that sort of deference to our boys?
Why, that's not journalism.
I'm Bernie Shaw.
I'm a citizen of the world.
Oh, I'm not an American.
No, you are.
You're an American first and a journalist second, because without being an American, you wouldn't have anything to write about.
I got to go.
Jason Lewis in for the great one, Rush Limbaugh, on Open Line Friday.
1-800-282-2882.
I'm Jason Lewis in for Rush Limbaugh.
What a great honor this has been.
Another hour coming up.
Don't go away.
Rush will be back on Tuesday.
The best of Rush on Monday, which will sure to be a stellar program as they all are.
Back to the phones we go in Atlanta, Georgia.
Jim, you're on Open Line Friday.
Hi.
Hey, Jason.
Well, I have a question I have yet to hear one person write or speak about, and that is, why wasn't Richard Armitage prosecuted for leaking Valerie Plame's name?
Could it be?
Could it possibly be because Valerie Plame wasn't really classified?
What she really wasn't, a clandestine agent?
Could that possibly be?
And do you suppose that might come out if they did prosecute him?
Yes.
Well, you know, the woman that helped write the law, Victoria Tunzing, testified to Congress that guess what?
I think it was called the Espionage Identities Act of 1982, did not cover Valerie.
The woman that helped write the law.
I mean, that gives the whole thing away.
Her testimony alone should have at least given pause, if not stopped a cold.
Not only that, what you've got here is a whistleblower, and the whistleblower's name was Carl Rove.
Think about this.
You had a, what I call, I'll be honest with you, I call it a coup within the CIA.
What is Valerie Plame or anybody else in the CIA doing, undercutting the stated policy of the administration, the guy they putatively work for?
What are they doing, sending her husband, knowing full well the report was done in advance, in effect?
What are they doing to that, to the president?
Well, is there sabotage within the CIA?
So naturally, they do this.
They try to undercut the administration.
What does Karl Rove do?
He confirms that, look, there's something funny going on.
That's all he did.
He wasn't charged with anything either.
Armitage wasn't charged with anything.
So if there's no underlying crime, how do you get somebody for perjury lying about something that apparently was not a crime?
Well, that raises another question.
Why didn't Patrick Fitzgerald, when he found out it was Armitage, just say, I'm calling it off?
Not only that, he knew it was Armitage, and he kept going after Libby.
Yeah.
This is why, forget about independent counsel.
Thankfully, the independent counsel statute, when it started to be applied to Democrats, all of a sudden it was done away with.
It was gone.
And that was where you had literally a fourth branch of government without meaningful oversight investigating everything under the sun.
And that, I think, frankly, it's a constitutional question.
But now you still have something called a special counsel at the Justice Department.
And the president did make a mistake when he allowed special counsel Fitzgerald to be appointed to investigate this.
It never should have been investigated.
There was nothing there except for a bunch of liberals at the CIA.
It's frustrating.
Well, when the facts get out, though, I mean, it did come out.
It did come out in our favor in the final analysis.
The problem is a whole lot of damage was done to Scooter Libby.
Where does he go to get his reputation back?
Where does he go to pay his fines and all of this?
A federal judge just a couple of days ago, or last month, I should say, dismissed the lawsuit filed by Plame and her husband against Chania, other top officials.
So the facts are on our side.
The problem is they still, in many cases, have to go through the media filter, don't they?
Jim, thanks for checking in.
Appreciate it.
Bob in Fort Myers, Florida, you're on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Hi.
Hi there.
How are you doing?
I'm doing wonderful.
Okay.
I must agree, it is not Iraq.
The problem is that George Bush really has governed almost as a liberal.
If you look at what he does, he spends like a drunken sailor.
We've never seen a veto.
He turns around.
No, he's vetoed one bill, I believe it was the stem cell research bill.
Yeah, that's the only thing because he figured that's the only thing that his base wouldn't come back and well, the test on that is coming up next month, or this fall, I should say, when all the appropriations bills have come up and Bush has pledged to veto all of them.
Yeah, he's got to do something with his work on his legacy now.
But immigration: 80% of the people in the country don't want it the way they did it.
And the reason is they don't trust him.
I don't trust him.
I thought I had elected a conservative.
Did you vote for him twice?
I elected a liberal.
Did you vote for him twice?
Yes, I did.
Look, I will not vote for him again.
Let me put this in context.
I got two words for you: President Gore.
Now, where would immigration be on that?
We'd have open borders.
Where would the tax cuts be?
We'd have a tax increase, no tax cut.
Where would Alito and Roberts be?
They'd still be on the appellate bench or someplace else.
And there would be no prosecution in the war on terror.
I do not disagree with what you're saying.
If it was lesser of two evils, I would vote for him again if he was the only stinking choice.
All right.
But you look at the other guys that are running right now, Thompson, and you start looking at them, and what do you have?
They are closet liberals.
Well, therein lies the problem, doesn't it?
You know, this started all the way back in 1976, and Jerry Ford, and God bless the late Jerry Ford.
But the fact is, he was no conservative, and we were told to vote for him, and not much happened when the Gipper lost in Kansas City.
And then it was Bush 41, and a lot of people, including me, that was when I was running for Congress in 1990, and that's when the great budget deal was struck.
And we raised taxes in 1990.
And you're right, the Republican faithful are a little hypersensitive right now into being conned once again.
So they're looking for the real thing.
They're looking for a Reaganite figure.
Look, when it comes to spending, that's what's done in the Republicans.
And it wasn't just George Bush.
It was the Republicans in Congress.
And when you had the Republican, I can remember all those years, we would complain about the Republicans in Congress, and they'd say, well, Jason, or they'd tell you, look, I got a Democrat president, not much I can do.
Then we got a Republican president, and they started spending like Democrats.
And unfortunately, the administration went along, and that alienated, disaffected a whole lot of conservatives.
And no matter the dissembling now by some of the Republican Party irregulars, they're still upset.
And that explains why you're right, why Thompson is doing pretty well before he declares.
Now, he hasn't said anything yet.
He hasn't come out on positions.
So the truth will be, the devil will be in the details, perhaps.
But you're right.
There is angst.
And it is over, quite frankly, some GOP betrayal.
And I gave you that famous quote by the Bush speechwriter over Reaganite conservative limited government principles.
Got to move.
Thanks for the call.
I'm Jason Lewis in for the great one, Rush Limbaugh on EIB.
All right, coming up next hour, we've got some Katrina news.
American Cancer Society is betraying their liberalism.
That is in the news.
Oh, yeah.
And one thing about all these people supposedly foreclosing on their homes, I want to get into this too.
It is not the mortgage broker's fault that you're foreclosing.
I'm Jason Lewis in for the great one Rush Limbaugh on Open Line Friday.
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