Rush Limbaugh Program - March 9, 2010, Tuesday, Hour #2

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March 9, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program

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March 9, 2010, Tuesday, Hour #2

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	Greetings to you, music lovers, thrill seekers, conversationalists all across the uh the fruited plane.
	Rush Limboy here behind the Golden EIB microphone, serving humanity simply by showing up.
	Great to have you here.
	Our telephone number, as always, 1-800-282-2882.
	If you want to go the email route, the uh email address L Rushball at EIB net.com, and we welcome to the program Carl Rove, who is now uh the author of a brand new book just out today, Courage and Consequence, My Life as a Conservative in the Fight.
	Uh and it's this is book this book is close to six hundred pages.
	Now before we bring Mr. Rove on, uh there's a there's a lot of talk, ladies and gentlemen, about Obama's health care bill.
	And I think the extremists on the right and the extremists on the left are trying to destroy what is essentially a very moderate attempt to bring health care peop uh c health care coverage to people that do not have it.
	I think it's an laudable thing, and we here are still investigating, to come to the exact correct uh interpretation of this.
	We're not ideologues here.
	Uh we do it uh straight down the middle.
	Tell me where I'm wrong, Mr. Rove.
	My God, I can't believe how dreadfully off base you are.
	This is a disaster.
	What has gone on?
	The North Pole is moving to the South Pole as we speak.
	Day is turning into night, night into day.
	You know, dogs and cats sleeping together.
	Oh my God, what is happening?
	Just a fun, lighthearted way to start off the pro.
	How are you doing?
	I'm doing fabulous.
	How about you, right?
	I'm fine.
	I saw Matt Lauer needed a seatbelt uh today on the third installment of your today interview.
	Well, you guys got into discussing uh weapons of mass destruction, and you know, Carl, you you the the book is replete with examples of all the insurance uh the uh the intelligence agencies all over the world.
	This is not news.
	This is what you all said at the time.
	There was a consensus.
	You couldn't afford to take a chance that uh that this guy wasn't in Iraq planning to uh to join the attacks on the United States.
	These guys just have a uh uh uh a template belief that all this was made up.
	Uh how do you how did you deal with it with with Lauer today?
	Well, I mean, uh I I I wanted to seize on that moment because he he brought up the issue about he he quoted uh snarky Dana Milbank, who is who's one of the least credible people writing for the Washington Post, which says a lot, and he, you know, in a throwaway line said Rove Rove deals with weapons of mass destruction, and uh so you know uh all of my columns were wrong.
	Well, I spent an entire chapter in which I make the point that Democrats who said before the Iraq war resolution vote that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction after looking at the same intelligence that President Bush was looking at, and that President Clinton had looked at when he was in office, they came to the same conclusion as Bush, and yet later we're we're had the turmidity to say Bush lied.
	And I think, and I make the point in the book, chapter 21, that this was a deliberate and cynical and hypocritical ploy by the Democrats, launched on July 15th of 2003 by Ted Kennedy, who made a speech.
	He is then echoed later in the day by Tom Dashwell.
	On the sixteenth, John Kerry and John Edwards both raise the issue, and Jane Harman, who's a n normally sane individual, joins in, chimes in saying Bush misled on intelligence.
	And I go I go person by person and talk about how Democrats uh made you know echoed the president's uh charge and uh that Sodom had WMD in some cases went far beyond what President Bush was willing to say, and yet uh, you know, later found themselves for politics trying to say that he Bush lied.
	Well you have the the Democrats are saying the identical thing that you all were saying, the same warnings back in 1998 when Bill Clinton was leading this charge.
	Well, and look, even at the time of the debate, uh in two thousand and two, Al Gore makes a speech out in California saying, quote, Iraq search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter, and we should assume it will continue for as long as Sodom is in power.
	We know Sodom has stored away secret supplies of biological weapons and chemical weapons throughout his country, end quote.
	That's what he said at the time of the debate.
	I mean, Ted Kennedy voted against the war resolution, and two days later gives a speech in which he says, Iraq has WMD.
	I admit it's a danger, but they're uh way short of war that we can we can deal with the situation.
	Hundred and ten Democrats vote for the war resolution.
	Sixty-seven of them stand up on the floor of the House or the Senate and say Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.
	So for people like you know, I mean, among them were Hillary Clinton, Al uh Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and John Edwards, Bob Graham, uh, you know, Senator Rockefeller, Congresswoman Harman, And for these people then to stand up, you know, Robert Bird, Barbara Boxer, Dick Gephardt, Henry Waxman, Ted Kennedy, Harry Reid, for these people now to stand up and say Bush lied is the height of cynicism and hypocrisy.
	And of course, the mainstream media wouldn't call him on it.
	They won't, you know, I was at a debate last ther Saturday in Arizona, and Howard Dean, in response to a question, literally said, I believe that Bush lied.
	And I I and I said, Well, you know, Howard, to be consistent, then you've got to say something about all these Democrats who repeated what what Bush said.
	And you know what he told me?
	In front of three thousand people at Arizona State University.
	He said they did it because Bush told them it.
	Told him that they had the WMD.
	They didn't come to their own independent conclusion.
	He said basically Bush told these guys, and they were all duped by Bush.
	Now, Carl, you admit in this book that one of the tactic was not replying to this and other lies, distortions, and even criticism.
	Why?
	Well, I it uh at the time, I mean.
	Why at the time?
	Well, it you know, each one was different.
	This one was look, I I I should have in the middle of two thousand three signed, you know, taken and and and and sounded the warning bell.
	But I didn't.
	I was preoccupied with the coming campaign and the pressure of the West Wing, and I didn't see how damaging it was.
	I did raise the issue, and we talked about it, but it's you know, there were a number of reasons for our inaction.
	One was people would say, well, it's beneath the dignity of the president to refute such outlandish charges.
	You know, if you if you wrestle with pigs, you give muddy.
	And then another one was it would look defensive.
	You know, people we want to we don't want to relitigate the past.
	We need to focus on winning the war, that'll resolve it, not on this argument which nobody accepts.
	And the third one, frankly, was that people were just worn down by the Iraq war debate.
	I mean, the fact that that that there weren't stockpiles was a blow, and some White House aides simply wanted to avoid the topic and hope that that that if we didn't say anything, it would evaporate.
	And I should have said at the time, this is my responsibility.
	I should have said, you know what, this is not going to go away, and this is going to be corrosive, and this is worthy of the President of the United States responding in a powerful venue, and the rest of us, all hands on deck, need to combat this be because i i you know i i this is this is going to be corrosive.
	And I and what was amazing was I knew I remembered, you know, obviously this was in my consciousness when I sat down to write the book about this being damaging.
	But when I got into it and sort of went back and reconstructed how it happened, you can't have Ted Kennedy, Tom Dashell, John Kerry, John Edwards, and Jane Harmon all within the space of two days say the same thing without there having been some coordination, and I suspect some polling and focus groups to say this is a line of attack that we can use against Bush for political purposes.
	Exactly.
	It was totally political, it was totally ideological.
	They still I my opinion here, but I just still think they had not gotten over what they thought was an election being stolen in two thousand.
	And I think that this this was a coordinated effort to discredit.
	Uh it was the first time in my life, Carl.
	I'm fifty-nine years old, and I'm I'm not naive enough to think this has never happened before, but in my lifetime, it was the first time during Iraq, and I think a lot of other things that that uh similar approaches were tried by the Democrats where they actually sought the defeat of the United States militarily for their own political gain.
	They didn't want to saddle themselves with it.
	They would have been happy to hang it around your neck and the presidents and so forth, but I'd never seen this.
	I've always heard politics ends at the water's edge, but this was new to me.
	No, and and look, that what amazed me, I think you're absolutely right, and what amazed me about this particular instance was that they that they were saying, in essence, that the president of the United States knowingly lied the country into war, and that that he had that he had you know at the heart of a giant conspiracy to mislead them.
	And and and and they knew better.
	I mean, Ted Kennedy, who was the first to launch this, God bless his soul, God rest his soul, you know, it was a lie.
	And for him to stand up there and say as he did, that President Bush lied by saying that that the that Iraq had WMD, when he himself had said the same thing, if Bush lied, he lied as well.
	I vote an entire chapter to this theme of uh entitled it, What Bipartisanship, and in there I sort of pull back the curtain and show some some instances that people are completely unaware of of where the Democrats uh, you know, uh as you say, they'd never gotten over the two thousand election, and for and for the next seven or eight years, they acted many of them in an inappropriate way because they could never get past the first victory of Bush.
	Talking to Carl Rove here, folks, his new book is Courage and Consequence Out Today, My Life as a Conservative in the fight.
	This Ted Kennedy business, God rest his whole, as you say.
	This was after you had magnanimously, the president had magnanimously brought him in to join you in working on on uh on education legislation.
	Uh yes.
	And and look, I to me, Ted Kennedy is a very interesting personality because on the one hand, he was capable of, you know, uh uh inspiring great loyalty among his staff and of working tirelessly.
	I you know, look, I didn't like his politics, but I sure did I sure did uh you know like uh the challenge of working around him and with him because if he came to a meeting, you better have done your homework because he will he would have done his.
	You know, he he was absolutely uh ready to uh Well now many of us out here watching all this hear you say this and they go, okay, you're trying to work with these guys while we see it as they're trying to destroy you.
	Well, not work with and us in the in the in the process.
	Yeah, but look, uh a president has got to do some of this, he's got to put aside some of this stuff in order to uh you know to to sort of move forward.
	He can't take this personally.
	He's got a president has got to say, look, I understand that they're doing politics, but I've got to try and find a way to move the country forward.
	You just can't go into permanent open warfare.
	But I gotta tell you, Ted Kennedy, and I and again, I admire the man, but but my point is is that I was really surprised when when Alito, the second one of our Supreme Court nominations, when Ted Kennedy got up and haranged him for twenty or twenty-five minutes in the in the Senate committee, saying he was prejudiced against average American, sexist, corrupt, and racist.
	I was taken aback.
	I mean, you know, what what he did to Bob Bork, Judge Bork, a respected and distinguished American, was beyond the pale.
	So why were you decided to do with Sam Alito?
	Why would you again you it was sort of hard to connect these two guys?
	I mean, Ted Kennedy, a guy that would be reasonable and rational and try and work with you on some on one matter and then go out and say things that he had to know in his heart of heart were fundamentally untrue.
	So he did it once with Bork.
	Why were you shocked at Alito?
	Because look, uh, you know, Bork was Bork was he you yeah, I I read the transcripts uh last year of the two speeches.
	The the Bork speech is a complete mischaracterization of Bork's political views.
	Yeah.
	The the the Alito is a complete distortion of Alito's personal history and and and and personal views.
	I mean, he literally calls him all but racist, sexist, corrupt.
	And I mean, he explicitly says that he's against average Americans.
	I mean, it was it was, you know, Bork was bad enough where he took the decisions of Bork and interpreted their consequences for policy outcomes.
	That was bad.
	That was despicable.
	But what he did against Alito was was so far worse in many ways, because he was he was making assumptions about the personal beliefs of a essentially very decent and very honorable man who had sacrificed much for our country by serving on the judiciary rather than you know,
	rather than getting a big paycheck at some law firm, he's working as a federal judge and serving our country with great distinction, and to have his character savaged by a man who, you know, was sitting across the table from him and judging him as sexist, corrupt, and racist and saying he was against average Americans, I I it was it was it did take me aback.
	Talking to Carl Rove about his new book, we got to take a break.
	We'll be back and continue after this.
	Welcome back.
	It's Rush Limbaugh, and we're talking to Carl Rove.
	His new book is Courage and Consequence, My Life as a Conservative in the Fight.
	And the um the book is uh is out today.
	Carl, uh one of my favorite questions to ask people is uh who get as close to you, as close to uh power as you were.
	I mean, you were you were there for eight years and many years prior to that with um with with President Bush.
	What most surprised you about the White House, the operation there working for the President and the whole process of quote unquote running the country and the world, and what what how do you um go in there and and and and not pinch yourself and say, gee, look at where I am and and get roll up the sleeves and really take it seriously for what you're doing.
	Well, it was funny.
	Andy Card, who was Bush's first chief of staff and former Secretary of Transportation under Bush 41 and had served in the Reagan White House, made the point when we w When each of the senior members of the White House staff came aboard, he said, if there's ever a day when you don't feel a special feeling when you come in the gate to work here, then it's time for you to go.
	And he was right, because as long as you recognize that it really is an extraordinarily special place, that you are not it but part of it, that you are pat you are not history but you're passing through history.
	Then you can come into the place with a sense of service and um obligation and commitment and dedication, and when you lose that feeling, it's time for you to go.
	And uh you know, I I there was not a day that I worked at the White House where I didn't feel honored to be able to walk in the gate.
	There was not a day that I wasn't aware of the extraordinary sacrifices that not just my s my senior staff colleagues made.
	I mean, I had a senior staff colleague who literally sat down and figured out he had adult children getting ready to go to college or in college, and he sat down and figured out how long his savings and his lines of credit would allow him to serve, and he served till that day and then left.
	And uh, you know, I saw Steve Friedman who came in to serve as the National Economic Council advisor, who literally, when he came into the White House, the White House ethics lawyer said, You will have to unwind some complicated head fund positions literally overnight and you will lose tens of millions of dollars, and he said, Where do I sign?
	I mean it and then I saw people like, you know, I I was honored to speak at the retirement ceremonies of the chiefs of the White House mess.
	One of them really deeply moved me.
	These are guys who served their entire Navy careers in the in in you know, feeding other swabs, and they were honored to end their careers as the chiefs of the Navy mess.
	And one of them was a Filipino American who joined the Navy as a Filipino and became an American citizen, and the greatest thing in his life was the day that he took the oath of office as a U.S. citizen.
	And uh, you know, y y you you serve around those kind of people, you know, the the guys in the uniform division of the Secret Service, you know, the snipers who sit atop the roof at the White House in all kinds of weather, you know, scanning the horizon for threats.
	I mean the White House operators one of the most moving things to me was I'm there w I made a friend in the White House who was a a who came to the White House as a young usher when John F. Kennedy was president, when Washington was a segregated town and he's an African American, and can you imagine what it's like for him to have served John Kennedy,
	Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bush 41, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush 43, and now to be at the White House and nearing retirement with an African American as president when this was a man who came to Washington when it was still segregated and you know, within and and people like him weren't expected to vote and participate and and what history he has seen and what service, selfless service he's given to our country.
	I want to ask you about President Bush here.
	And I I uh I've mentioned this to you before, and I've also mentioned this to uh to people who've called me on the radio uh during this program asking about uh President Bush's uh uh mannerisms on television.
	You and I both know, and everybody who knows him personally, when you're with him personally, and there's no TV cameras around, he is a dynamo and he never scutters and he is confident almost cocky when talking about things and he knows a lot about it.
	You see why didn't we never see that man on TV?
	Or very rarely.
	You know, I don't know, because you're right.
	I mean, you get him and and I've had this experience a lot in the last year and a half as he's gone out on the speaking tour, and I've run into people who said, God, I saw your old boss at the you know, the whatever meeting in Toronto, or he came to the convention of whatever is in boy, I was blown away.
	Where was that guy during the last eight years?
	And look, the president President Bush has a fluency and a familiarity with the issues and a winning manner and an extraordinary recall.
	And we ill served him by not putting him in in ways and and places where that would shine like it like it does naturally.
	I mean, as you know, he's got a winning personal manner about him, and he remembers every name and every detail and enjoys being around people, and yet there's just something about the way that we allowed him to be put on television or put in front of the public that too often made it look stilted and restrained and uh you know not as effective as he could be.
	But it's it r it's uh you know, it's it's i i th i in a White House you were ha i any president is subject to such public attention that you're not gonna get everything right, and even if you identify things that are wrong, you're not gonna be able to get everything changed.
	And that was one that I wish we had done a better job of focusing on and helping him be himself.
	Got a couple of minutes here, and I know you're not going to be able to explain everything here, but um I want to go back to you.
	You were you were shocked that Ted Kennedy would go after Alito.
	None of us really were.
	And and were you were you shocked when they came after you on the Valerie Plane stuff.
	I mean, at some at what point did you realize that these this was not just the normal ebb and flow of Democrats and Republicans sharing power, that they were out to destroy you and everybody in the administration.
	Well, I knew that all along, and uh but but what got me was that the media uh were so spun up when they thought it was me, and then they were so unspun up when they figured out it wasn't me.
	I mean, when they thought that I had outed Valerie Plame and that the prosecutor was looking at me for that, uh, they were spun up.
	I mean, I had for months and months and months, people surrounding the house on weekends and you know, film crews out front.
	I had demonstrators protesting in front of the house, people with bullhorns yelling things at my son, and you know, and and and I don't just mean periodically, I mean all the time when they thought it was me.
	And what was ironic was, and people read this in the book, right from the get go, it was clear I had no vulnerability on the or on the question of of releasing Valerie Plame's name because I didn't.
	I said to Bob Novak when he told me what he had heard from Richard Armitage, though I didn't know it was Richard Armitage at the time.
	Uh I my simple response was to say I've heard that too.
	So that right from the get go, it was clear from the FBI and from the and then after the appointment of the special prosecutor that I had no vulnerability on this fundamental question.
	And readers will be shocked to figure out or to find out in the book what it was after four appearances before the grand jury when Patrick Fitzgerald is on the is on the eve of indicting me and f has a meeting with my lawyer and he's all that thought right there.
	You bet.
	A great place to stop as we take an obscene profit timeout.
	All right.
	Be right back.
	Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network back with Carl Rove.
	New book today, Courage and Consequence, my life as a conservative in the fight.
	Four appearances uh before the grand jury, Patrick Fitzgerald on the eve of indicting you.
	And everybody is breathless awaiting that very fact.
	It didn't happen.
	It didn't happen, but on October twentieth of two thousand and five, my lawyer, Bob Leskin of Pat and Boggs met with uh Fitzgerald at his office in Chicago, and finally, after sort of circling around with it, Fitzgerald laid onto the table the issue that he was concerned about, and when and which you know boggles my mind what it was it was so minor and so far out of the uh I out on the fringes of all this, it was unbelievable.
	And when my lawyer gave him the answer to the to the question that he had, literally uh Fitzgerald says, You've rocked my world.
	And uh and and literally a day or two later, uh lets my attorney know that no action would be taken at that point, and six months later, after having you know, received additional information that was in support of what had been told to him on that day, six m uh he lets me dangle for six months and then and then says, you know, in essence, ever this is done and we're over.
	But people will be shocked to read what all of this was about.
	It was not about Valerie Plame.
	It was not about Joe Wilson, it was about something completely else.
	And and i if if he ever asked me about it during my four appearances of the grand jury, uh I ended up making five.
	The final one were where in the fifth uh appearance before the grand jury in April of two thousand and six, uh he asked me a couple of questions about this issue and uh resolved it and let me go.
	But uh but people will be shocked when they read this.
	Now this is this is this is interesting.
	You say it's not about Plan, it's not about Wilson.
	Uh and all this time, he knew that Armitage was the leaker.
	Exactly.
	He knew that Armitage was a leaker, and look, he he had known right from the get go what I had said to Bob Novak, and apparently it it i he also had confirmation of it from Novak, and right from the g the the beginning, they they've for two years they said Rove is not a target, he's merely a witness.
	And then it was but but then two years in they began to develop a weird theory about something far out on the edges of all this, which people can read about in the book.
	And and it was really amazing when in August of two thousand and six, it's finally revealed that that Richard Armitage was the person who sat down with Bob Novak and said Valerie Plane was Joe Wilson's wife, she works at the CIA and she sent him to Africa.
	And and when that happened, the Washington Post ran an exculpatory editorial saying, well, I guess this really didn't matter to much because everybody knows Richard Armitage is not a political gunslinger and he didn't do this for any bad reason.
	I mean, all these reporters who camped out on my front doorstep.
	There was an NBC reporter who was on with Don Imus when I must was telling prison rape jokes about me when they thought I was going to go to jail.
	And and and when and when Richard Armitage was revealed to be the source, I don't remember her, you know, chortling along to any prison rape jokes t told about him.
	I mean, this is this is official Washington.
	Rove is a conservative, Rove is defiantly conservative, and Richard Armitage is part of the Washington, D.C. establishment.
	So when we think it's Rove, let's go get that SOB.
	And when we find out it's Armitage, oh, never mind, don't worry about it.
	Well, that's the point.
	But Scooter Liberty is the guy that paid the price for this, and Armitage knew all along that Libby hadn't done anything, and so did General Powell.
	They both knew all along that Libby hadn't done anything here.
	And Libby, of course, is is uh what was it convicted for lying or some such thing?
	So how do you guys have how do you have how do you have a civil relationship with either Powell or Armitage going forward?
	Well, you know, it's funny, I talk about it in the book, and and pal has a weird sense of humor about it.
	At a dinner in two thousand seven, uh I was going walking down the aisle, and there was Pal who, you know, sort of gregariously booming to mean I got somebody here I want you to meet, and uh he grabbed my hand and held me fast and turned, and behind him was Richard Armitage, and he made the two of us shake hands, and you know, which I was gamely willing to do.
	Armitage didn't look too comfortable at it.
	But I you know, look, I I I don't know whether I don't know what Secretary Powell knew and when he knew it, but I do know that in August and September of two thousand and three, while the White House knew uh of my contact with Robert Novak, they did not know of Richard Armitage's contact until August of two thousand seven.
	The the State Department, whenever they found out about Armitage's contact with Novak, did not tell the White House.
	In fact, the White House, the def the State Department counsel, Will Taft I Fourth, told the White House they had information regarding the uh the uh uh the incident, and but we're gonna share it with the Justice Department only and not the White House.
	So this was at a point where the President was saying, I want to know who told Bob Novak Valerie Plame.
	Well, uh th this leads to another uh subject matter that that that I want to get into as we move into the present day, and that is uh you you're you're a huge expert on on presidential history.
	I've I've I've shared with uh with some friends of mine occasionally on this program, uh my my uh uh overwhelming uh uh appreciation and and admiration for your knowledge of the presidency.
	Uh I've I've uh I've sat in Carl's office in the White House for hours listening to the history of the presidency and William McKinley is one of Carl's favorites.
	And uh I I want to ask you, uh uh aside from the Civil War and the days of the founding, in the modern era, has there ever been a time where things were so partisan as they are today?
	Um I y you know, I th they've they've been episodically partisan, but what gets me about this one is is that the President of the United States is so um tone-deaf and so intent upon conducting himself in a manner in which he he basically is disrespecting his political opposition.
	He's not taking it into account.
	I mean, what President Obama has made three fundamental mistakes.
	The first one is that he ran as a centrist and he's governing as an extreme liberal or a social democrat.
	The second is is that he went to great pains to paint himself as a advocate of postpartisanship or bipartisanship, and he has made no attempt to do so.
	I was shocked.
	Last March 5th, he held a meeting at the White House with Republicans and Democrats to kick off a discussion of health care.
	His next bipartisan meeting at the at the White House was February 25th of this year.
	When John Boehner said that he had not had a substantive meeting at the White House on any subject for months and had not heard from the White House chief of staff in months, it was shocking to me because it basically said Obama is outsourcing the dis outsourcing the writing of legislation and the legislative process to two of the most hyperpartisans in Washington, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.
	And look, the President of the United States, where er regardless of the Congress being Republican or Democrat, needs to be involved and setting the right tone in Congress.
	And if what you basically say is, I don't care what you do up there on the hill, just let me be able to check off cap and trade and health care and blah blah and blah blah.
	You just get it done, and you y he's giving rise to the worst instincts of the hyperpartisans who run the Democratic Caucus in the House and Senate.
	And that is an abrogation of leadership.
	Well, I know that bipartisanship is a um a big thing uh with people that work inside the beltway.
	Those of us outside it with the pitchforks think bipartisanship is a democrat designed trick to get us to sacrifice and compromise away our core beliefs and go along with theirs so that there is this appearance of comedy and so forth.
	Will you tell me how bipartisanship in theory in your world works?
	Well, look, you do it is useful.
	Look, it is useful for you to be able to find areas of agreement.
	Because there are some things like look, we in the 2005 energy bill, for example, which passed with huge bipartisan votes.
	We we got a we removed the obstacles to the expansion of the nuclear power industry in America, which is really important for the future of our country.
	And we when we came into office, there were zero applications for nuclear power plants as there had been for the last nearly thirty years.
	When we left office, there were twenty-two applications for new new power plants at the NRC.
	And we got it by patient work to say, okay, look, let us find ways for a state.
	Don't we all agree we need more nuclear power?
	Don't we all agree that we need to have clearer rules and greater ability for the country to deliver drill off of its uh off of its coast?
	Let's find ways to move those those things forward.
	And so there are ways to do it.
	And and granted, you know, if you have a president, that president will dominate that that process and bend it more his way rather than the other way.
	But nonetheless, there is a there are things over which we can broadly agree.
	This guy, though, is so ideal uh ideological.
	This guy is so uh aloof from the process.
	This guy is so willing to outsource the writing of legislation to to read and Pelosi that that that for him, bipartisan means we won the last election, do everything we want to do, and don't bother talking to me and don't expect me to listen.
	And that's wrong.
	That's not the way that the the founders did not mean the system to work that way.
	They they wanted us to try and find ways imperfectly to come together on areas of agreement where we could so that the country could sustain itself in the times when we would when we could not agree.
	Look, we're not gonna get Bernie San Barney say uh Bernie Frank to vote for a tax cut.
	We're not gonna get Bernie Saunders to vote for the Patriot Act.
	We're not gonna get, you know, Barbara Lee to be supportive of a strong national defense.
	We're not gonna get, you know, Maxine Waters to be supportive of limited government.
	Okay, right.
	So why why do you care about working with those people?
	Why don't we just go out and defeat them?
	Well, look, look, first of all, there's some of their they they come from comf comfortable districts where they're not going to be defeated, but that we ought to find the people who r who whom we can find common cause.
	And let me give you an example.
	There were there were some very important pension reforms that were written by Ben Cardin and Rob Portman when they were together in the House and serving on the House uh uh health, education, labor, and pension plan uh uh committee.
	These things will have far reanging ramifications for the ability of private individuals to have a secure retirement that is funded by them and their company rather than being dependent upon government.
	Well, that's if the company is in existence after Obama gets finished.
	Well, well, that's right.
	That's right.
	Well, that's that's another question.
	But the point is these two guys got together and said, here's some sensible things that we as a Republican, we as a Democrat can find agreement on that are common sense and good for the country.
	Carl Rove is with us.
	We got to take a brief time out.
	Final segment with him coming up right after this.
	Don't go away.
	Carl Rove on the radio on the EIB network and his new book, Courage and Consequence, my life as a conservative in the fight.
	The big question right now, of course, is the health care bill, the reconciliation and all of this, the uh the the House uh basically passing the Senate bill as is.
	Frankly, I don't think there's gonna be reconciliation.
	I don't think there's time.
	I think if the House does pass the Senate bill, Obama's gonna sign it before anybody knows what's happened.
	But is he gonna get the votes in the House for it?
	I'm gonna I'm trying to write my column this Thursday about in the Wall Street Journal, and I'm and so I'm spending a lot of time trying to figure it out.
	I'd have to say at the end of the day, I don't think it happens, but I but uh we shouldn't underestimate the powers of Nancy Pelosi.
	She can persuade, she could cajole, she can argue, she can threaten.
	And she's got a lot of unspent stimulus money to pass around.
	Yeah, well, and and look, she's got a lot of things that she can tell people will take care of you.
	But on the other hand, she has a heavy lift because at the end of the day, uh her argument is if you've got a problem with this bill, we can take care of it in reconciliation.
	Well, what happens if in the Senate they pass somehow pass it through the House?
	They get the pro lifers to say, you know what, I'll vote for a pro abortion bill.
	They get the deficit hawks to vote for a bill that is broken and is going to cause huge deficits.
	They get the liberals who don't uh who don't who want more of a public option and they and they say we'll fix it for you in the Senate reconciliation.
	And what happens if the Senate Republicans can keep them from fixing things in Senate reconciliation?
	And so they you know they don't get the the pro-life provision, or they don't get the all the stinky stuff taken out, or they don't get all of the bribes removed, and they don't get, you know, the the it put in a in a where the taxes and the benefit cuts uh you know equal the cost of the bill for the first ten years.
	What happens with all this kind of stuff?
	Well, you know, this this is fundamental.
	I mean, this is transforming the country in ways it's never been transformed before.
	Our country will be fundamentally different in dangerous ways if this bill passes.
	Now you've met Obama how many times?
	A lot.
	We we you know, we actually we shared common friends, so when he got elected to the Senate, whenever he'd come to the White House, we'd sort of hang around and talk to each other and chit chat about our mutual friends.
	Uh and he and look, he's got a lot of personal charm.
	He's very bright, he's incredibly intelligent.
	He also doesn't think he needs to apply himself.
	I in these White House meetings when the president would go around the table, Senator Obama would be probably the least useful comment in the room.
	Generally something along the lines of I'm honored to be here.
	I've listened with interest to what my colleagues have said.
	It's an important issue, and I'm gonna take what I learned here today home and think about it a lot.
	I mean, that was basically you know, he dress it up as he can, but he was he was one of the least impressive legislators I saw there.
	Well now, Carly, I I you said that he's very intelligent, and uh I I get caught up in all this, and how do we define intelligent?
	How do we define smart?
	Because in in my view, and I'm not asking you to concur with this.
	This is I think he's wrong about everything.
	I he's dangerously wrong.
	I don't I don't subscribe to this notion he's very smart.
	I think he's been ill educated.
	I think he's been ill mentored, and I think he poses a great danger.
	And whether he's smart IQ wise, it doesn't matter.
	I think he's dead wrong on all of this.
	And it's uh it a lot of people do, and and it I've there's a s there's a uh democracy corpse in his word poll out today from Greenberg and Carvel saying that if he's gonna if he's gonna have any success in foreign policy, he's gonna have to cowboy it up like Bush did.
	How does that make you feel?
	Well, look, I I I think he's very intelligent.
	I don't think he's right.
	I'm I'm with you.
	I think he is he's g his world view is wrong.
	I think he is very liberal.
	He I think he uh you know he plays like he's a centrist, and I and I thought during the campaign, frankly, that he was being so emphatic about his centrism that we would expect more uh expect to see more of it, and we haven't.
	But but look, uh he he is a very bright individual who is capable of making a compelling argument as he did in the 2008 campaign.
	Some of it is artifice, some of it is, you know, frankly, not true.
	Uh i it's well reasoned, some of it is emotional and appealing, but at the heart of it is is somebody who is fundamentally trying to portray himself as something and that he's not.
	I talk about this in the book because in uh uh in 19 or excuse me, 2007, an aide of mine came in and said, Do you know that you're in Barack Obama's book?
	I said, Really?
	Audacity of hope, I'm in there?
	He said, Yeah, saying, quote, we are a Christian nation, end quote.
	And he has it in quotes with my name attached to it.
	Now look, I've never said any such thing.
	I i it's one thing to say we prize, we're based on the Judeo-Christian ethic or draw from the Judeo-Christian ethic that we we've we that we have enshrined the free uh st you know, the free expression of religion, that we have no state establishment of of of a state church.
	You know, but but you can't say we're a Christian nation, because that leaves out the Jews and the Buddhists and the Sikhs and the and the non-believers, all of whom, you know, under our Constitution are as good an American as anybody else.
	So you know, but he easily can said that about me.
	And I confronted him about it.
	And he had no good exp explanation of why he would attribute to me something that I didn't say.
	He then went on in his book to accuse me of being a nineteen sixties radical.
	And as I say in my book, isn't that rich?
	I I don't remember trying to bomb a uh government office building like his buddy Bill Ayers or saying, God damn America, like the pastor in whose pews he said for twenty years, or having said that I was proud of my country for the first time at the age of forty like his wife.
	And for him, I mean, here's a guy who positions himself as the advocate as of a new kind of politics and who engages in the worst kind of old fashioned political slurs.
	And it's not that, you know, look, I'm used to that kind of stuff, but it really is hypocritical for somebody to say I am better and newer and fresher and different, and then go do that kind of stuff.
	He's just Ted Kennedy Jr.
	Yeah, well.
	As they said, he's the last surviving Kennedy brother.
	They're no different.
	They're all the same.
	They're just they're all Ted Kennedy.
	You know, he said somebody the other day showed me a piece of footage from 2006 in which he said, Carl Rove, he you know look, he invoked my name in 2007, 2008, several hundred times, generally to say we're going to end Carl Rove style politics.
	Yeah, but that's because they had drummed up so much hatred for you guys.
	And he it was just a it was a talking point.
	It's convenient.
	It's convenient for him.
	But but that's not who the you know, that's not who he professed to be, was it?
	But I saw this clip in which he said, quote, Carl Rove does not believe in government, end quote.
	This was at a time when I was serving in government.
	I mean, you accused me of being an anarchist.
	I gotta go.
	I I'm one of the TV heartbreaks.
	It's the only one of the hour that we have.
	Thank you so much.
	Talk to you soon.
	Okay, we are back.
	We got to wrap up this hour.
	We'll come back and uh and uh start getting your phone calls in on this program um next hour.
	We haven't taken a phone call yet, have we?
	One?
	What, Rove?
	Carl Rove is the one phone.
	Now we took one more before that.
	Okay, by the way, there's a big health care protester.
	Ritz Carlton in Washington.
	There's an insurance executive meeting going on inside the Ritz Carlton, and the S E I U is protesting out there, the union being led by Howard Dean.

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