It’s the left, my friends, that’s trying to stamp out any dissenting opinion, in the public square, in political campaigns. You can’t post anything in the public square that represents your religious views. You used to be able to do that. The left will not allow it now. They impose speech codes on conservative students. They go to court time and again to force God and the Ten Commandments out of public places. They try to stop pro-life protests. They seek to curtail robust debate during elections. It’s the ACLU and the
These are the people that are trying to stamp out any dissenting opinion, any dissenting speech. They’re the ones that came up with the whole notion of political correctness. And what’s that? You’ve got to say things they agree with. You’ve got to say things the way they want them heard or they’re going to do their best to shut you up. It is the left in this country trying to get the Fairness Doctrine back in place at the FCC so as to stamp out what they cannot defeat in the arena of political ideas. It’s not the right. It’s not conservatives that are stamping out dissent. We laugh at these people. We make fun of them. We simply repeat what they say, and we get a couple of laughs out of it. But nobody is trying to shut them up; nobody is denying them access anywhere. It’s the left that’s doing this. And for this dunderhead Wesley Clark, who may be brilliant in some ways, may be smart in some ways, but he’s a political dunce, folks, for him to come along and allow himself to be used as a sock puppet by the Clintons and the other extremists in this party, to put all these words in his mouth, is an indication he is not his own man. I don’t care what anybody says.
We still don’t know what Wesley Clark thinks about anything because he probably doesn’t know. He probably hasn’t taken the time to decide. And we also know we can’t get the truth from this guy. This guy says that the White House called him on 9-11 to link Iraq with the attacks. Didn’t happen. He also said he called Karl Rove twice; Karl Rove wouldn’t return his call, wouldn’t take his call. If Karl Rove had taken his calls he’d be a Republican. White House logs show he never called Karl Rove. Karl Rove never got any calls, never returned any calls. There weren’t any calls to return. This, folks, ought to be troubling. But instead the left is so eager, they look past all of these obvious defects – and that’s what they are – and instead build this guy up into what they want someone to be. They cannot find their ideal candidate because he/she doesn’t exist. 
So they’ve taken somebody that’s got a good outer appearance, somebody that makes them look like something they’re not, in this case, a decorated military man. (They know they have trouble finding one of their own legitimately.) And now they’re trying to put words in this man’s mouth. I mean it’s a Stepford candidate. That’s exactly what he is. He’s a Stepford candidate, and it’s the Clintons that are animating him and putting words in his mouth, and the things that this guy is saying, if he had a brain at all, he wouldn’t allow this to happen. You go out there and actually say that a new American patriotism?look at how these people are defining it. Patriotism is all of these long-haired, maggot-infested, dope-smoking FM types running around protesting achievement, protesting success, protesting American dynamism. Those are the people that we’ve got to now say are the new patriots. We’ve got to get out of the way and let these malcontent ne’er-do-wells define what American greatness is. We can’t allow that to happen because there’s nothing about them that’s great. They are failures. They are misfits and that’s why they are angry. In the most free and open society and market in the world, they haven’t found a way to make it. They don’t have meaningful work; they don’t have meaningful jobs and meaningful income so they’re always unhappy and malcontent, marching in the streets, protesting those who are successful, protesting a country that offers limitless opportunity for those who actually created and want to work for it, all because they have failed.
They’ve also gotten hold of young kids in school in a multicultural curriculum and they’re teaching these young kids that America is unfair and unjust and discriminates and you kids don’t have a chance. “Join us in making this country great for all the malcontents and failures.” And Wesley Clark, Ashley Wilkes, because he seeks something meaningful in his own life that he hasn’t yet achieved, is allowing himself to be used as a sock puppet by other malcontents who seek nothing but pure power. So don’t lecture us about this respect-for-dissent-even-during-war crap, general. This is an insult to everybody’s intelligence. And don’t, General Clark, by implication compare these protesters with the courageous men and women who are as we speak deployed in horrible places throughout the world putting their lives on the line to protect us. They’re the patriots, general, not these long-haired, maggot-infested, dope-smoking malcontent failures. They are not the people we need to be celebrating. They do need help. They actually need to get somehow disconnected from the liberals that have somehow controlled them all these years and get a positive outlook on life, something they’ll never have as long as they’re tied to the left. As long as they remain linked to the left they’re going to be doomy and gloomy and full of malcontentism. They’re never going to have a positive outlook, a bright outlook on the day, the month, the year, or the future at large. It’s just, as I was going to say, it’s a crying shame. It really is.
And to now say that those are the people we need to celebrate and make way for and call the new patriots, while at the same time the left engages in activity that’s designed to denigrate the efforts of the men and women in uniform in Iraq and by design put them at greater risk? We end up telling lies about the success and/or failures in Iraq. We destroyed the morale of the people facing bullets, who are wearing the uniform of the American armed forces, doing everything they can to destroy their morale, not report their successes. What is the purpose of that? You think that’s by accident? No way. It’s by design. Because the last thing the left wants when they’re not in power is a victorious and rejoicing America. Not when they’re not in charge, it ain’t going to happen. An America that does good things and America that’s victorious, an America that is righteous when they’re not in power, ain’t going to happen. And that’s exactly what is going on now. Everything that they can do to ensure failure in Iraq, in the war on terrorism, domestically and the economy, they’ll do it – to avoid their enemies and political opponents getting credit for all of these successes.
Second thing, when is it patriotic, General Clark, to denounce the military and our commander-in-chief in the midst of a war? That’s dissent. That’s free speech. But it ought not be confused with patriotism. And that’s what you’re doing now. And there’s nothing patriotic about the hate-America-first crowd. But what amazes me about this, this whole subject is the insistence by the likes of Ted Kennedy that we not question the patriotism of those who dissent, when it’s people like Howard Dean and by implication Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards and all that, who do question the patriotism of John Ashcroft. It is the left that is using patriotism to attack the Bush administration; it’s not the other way around. Bush is not attacking anybody’s patriotism. He wouldn’t dare.
And finally, General Clark here has embraced the race-baiting policies of his mentor, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton, has he not? I know it’s said, and some people actually believe it, but Muslims are not mistreated by our government. And journalists ought not let Clark or any presidential candidate get away with such comments without challenging them. And that’s something that bugs me and always has. The left can make any claim they want; it never gets challenged, it just gets reported. Only when Republicans say things are they challenged to prove it, to validate it or whatever. When the left makes these outrageous claims, the press runs right after them and says, “Defend yourself against this charge leveled by our great senator Kennedy, or our great senator Edwards, or our great senator Kerry or whoever.”
If Clark is talking about the detention of less than a thousand people after 9-11, if that’s what he thinks is mistreatment of the Muslim population, he ought to say so. He didn’t say that. The fact is the overwhelming majority of these detainees had broken federal law, most of them have violated U.S. immigration laws. It’s everyday practice to detain such violators while their cases are under consideration because to release them into the general population means their disappearance. They’re just going to vanish. Now, after 9-11, that would have been a complete abdication of our government’s responsibility to protect our national security. We ought to be profiling here! We know damn well who’s got it in for us. And the idea that we shouldn’t profile is a bunch of cowardice. Here we are once again deciding what we ought to do based on what people are going to think of us, rather than deciding what we’re going to do based on what’s best for our defense and national security.
These are the people that have gotten hold of Wesley Clark, these are the things that Wesley Clark is saying he doesn’t any more believe than what Brer Rabbit believes. But he’s willing to have these things put in his mouth for whatever reason he, Wesley Clark, is willing to be used, probably because he hasn’t found anything meaningful to do on his own in his own life. But despite all this, folks, what I find most disturbing about all of this – the view that Clark holds of his own country. He sees a nation of authoritarians who trash free speech, a nation of bigots who target Muslims for discrimination. And here’s the kicker. He sees a nation that must surrender its own defense and national security concerns to international organizations populated by American-hating regimes like the United Nations. That’s who’s in there, nations that hate us, nations of thugs, dictators and the like, friends of terrorists. We are supposed to subordinate our national defense to that crowd.
These are not the words or the vision of a political leader. These are the same lame and repetitive allegations of the rest of the Democratic presidential field. He’s not saying anything that Howard Dean isn’t saying. He’s not saying anything that John Kerry isn’t saying when he speaks. He’s not saying anything that any of the others aren’t saying. There’s nothing new, there’s nothing unique about Wesley Clark, because these people are all liberals, and they are all the same, and they all believe the same hate-America-first crap and they are very comfortable saying so because they know they’ve got an audience for it out there that they’ve been creating for the last 50 or 75 years. The attempt here is to portray the Democratic Party and Wesley Clark as yet another new type of Democrat, and it’s a complete fraud. There is no new Democrat; there never has been a new Democrat. They are all 100 percent liberals, and they know they can’t get anywhere if they admit to being that, so they’re forever concocting these new people, new Democrats, Democrat Leadership Conference. Gore’s one, Clinton’s one. They’re all liberals, folks, and there’s not a thing different from one to the other, and there’s certainly nothing new about them.
One other point. General Clark, he was in charge of overseeing U.S. military operations in Rwanda. Did you know this? Yes, my friends, it was General Clark in charge of overseeing U.S. military operations in Rwanda when UN peacekeepers were prevented from intervening in the slaughter of nearly one million Rwandans in 1994. Remember that genocide over there that Bill Clinton?”Yeah, yeah, I apologize for that, I’m sorry I didn’t get moving on that a little bit sooner.” And reportedly Wesley Clark along with Madeleine Albright, urged Clinton not to use military force to stop the genocide. Wesley Clark, Madeleine Albright: “Don’t use military force to stop this.” Now Wesley Clark poses as a man concerned about civil rights and bigotry. If this guy keeps talking, and he keeps allowing these people like Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, or whoever else is doing it to put words in his mouth, history is not going to judge him as anything but a dunce.
We do not need General Clark or any of the rest of you liberals. We don’t need to change the definition of patriotism in order to conform with the anti-war, hate-America-first radicalism of the Democratic leadership. And that’s what this is all about. “We have got to change the definition of patriotism so this anti-war, anti-America, hate-America-first radicalism gets normalized.” That’s what this is all about. That’s why we’ve got to change the definition of patriotism, and that’s why we’ve got to have a new patriotism, precisely so that the anti-war, hate-America-first radicals that run the Democratic Party will be perceived as normal. Ain’t going to fly here. You can bring out all the great-looking, great smelling generals that you can find, and you can fill their mouths with all the great words that you think you’ve got, but it isn’t going to fool anybody, other than those who have already been fooled for 50 years by this never-ending bilge and drivel that you people are known for.
Read More of Rush’s Coverage…
(Ashley Wilkes Update: Wesley Clark’s Radical Left Wing Agenda)
