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“As Mr. Bush surely knew, it is a question that can upset the difficult balance Mr. Kerry must strike on Iraq. He has to portray himself as tough and competent enough to be commander-in-chief, yet appeal to the faction of Democrats that hates the war and eggs him on to call Mr. Bush a liar. ‘Kerry has always had this vulnerability of looking flip-floppy on the issue, and Bush is using this very shrewdly,’ says Walter Russell Meade, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations. He added, ‘Being silent on the question makes him look evasive, and saying something, anything gets him in trouble with one side of his party or another.'”Joe Biden said, one of Kerry’s friends, conceded the first rounds have gone to the president on this. “It’s frustrating as hell,” Biden said. He said this yesterday. So Bush upsets the difficult balance of Kerry’s new nuance on Iraq. The libs are beginning to concede that Kerry has been hit on this, and what does this have to do with? It has to do with two things, it has to do with Kerry flip-flopping and saying he would have gone ahead and voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq even if he knew there were no weapons of mass destruction but there’s something else, folks. There’s something else that’s really roiling them out there. They don’t know how to handle it.

(EIB PROFIT CENTER TIME-OUT)

RUSH: I tell you what. I just love this New York Times story, my friends. “Bush’s Mocking Drowns out Kerry’s Explanation of Iraq Votes,” almost like it’s unfair that Bush is making fun of Kerry. Then when you read the story, you find Joe Biden admitting it’s frustrating as hell to watch Kerry lose on this issue, and then you see this analysis. It says basically Bush upsets the difficult balance of Kerry’s new nuance. (Laughing.) On Iraq.

But, ladies and gentlemen, there’s more to it than just the Iraq vote. Senator Kerry paying the price for yet another blunder, and we’ll precede it with his update theme song, yes.

(Playing of Kerry theme song, Mighty Mouse)

RUSH: That’s it, ladies and gentlemen, our John Kerry update theme. Here he comes to save the day. Let’s go back to the Unity 2004 Journalists of Color conference. Senator Kerry addressing a group of minority journalists who received him famously well, applauded many times. This is what he had to say. This is August the 5th.

KERRY: I believe I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side and lives up to American values in history.

RUSH: We’ve got every nation that matters on our side. The Iraqis are on our side, it’s their country. But it’s this sensitive war, ladies and gentlemen, and if you have a TV, you want to turn on Fox or CNN you’ll find that we are very insensitively, as I say, invading areas of Najaf today. So president Cheney is in Dayton, Ohio. He’s speaking to war veterans there, and unloaded this morning.

CHENEY: Senator Kerry has also said that if he were in charge he would fight a more sensitive war on terror. America has been in too many wars for any of our wishes but not a one of them was won by being sensitive. President Lincoln and General Grant did not wage sensitive warfare, nor did President Roosevelt, nor Generals Eisenhower or MacArthur. A sensitive war will not destroy the evil men who killed 3,000 Americans and who seek the chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons to kill hundreds of thousands more. The men who beheaded Daniel Pearl and Paul Johnson will not be impressed by our sensitivity.

RUSH: Help is the way, eh?

(Continued playing of song.)

RUSH: He even goes to Cambodia.

(Continued playing of song.)

RUSH: Cambodia!

(Continued playing of song.)

That’s it, ladies and gentlemen, our John Kerry update theme. Here he comes to save the day. Let’s go back to the Unity 2004 Journalists of Color conference. Senator Kerry addressing a group of minority journalists who received him famously well, applauded many times. This is what he had to say. This is August the 5th.

KERRY: I believe I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side and lives up to American values in history.

RUSH: We’ve got every nation that matters on our side. The Iraqis are on our side. It’s their country. But it’s this sensitive war, ladies and gentlemen, and if you have a TV, you want to turn on Fox or CNN you’ll find that we are very insensitively, as I say, invading areas of Najaf today. So president Cheney is in Dayton, Ohio. He’s speaking to war veterans there, and unloaded this morning.

CHENEY: Senator Kerry has also said that if he were in charge he would fight a more sensitive war on terror. America has been in too many wars for any of our wishes but not a one of them was won by being sensitive. President Lincoln and General Grant did not wage sensitive warfare, nor did President Roosevelt, nor Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur. A sensitive war will not destroy the evil men who killed 3,000 Americans and who seek the chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons to kill hundreds of thousands more. The men who beheaded Daniel Pearl and Paul Johnson will not be impressed by our sensitivity.

RUSH: What is this sensitivity? What, we supposed to greet the terrorists are Hallmark cards? Now, I was watching. There’s an attempt here to do damage control. The Kerry campaign has tried to clarify what he meant by this. They put out a statement and the upshot of it is that, “No, I’m not talking about actually fighting wars in a sensitive way, I was talking about reaching out to allies in a more sensitive way so that they would join us and be on our side.” But wait a sec. I know it’s not any better, but it’s not accurate, either. If you go back and listen to what he said, “I believe I can fight — fight — a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror,” comma, “that reaches out the to other nations and brings?” Fight and sensitive. They can try to worm out of this all they want but they’re going to have trouble. Cheney continued this morning in Dayton, Ohio.

CHENEY: As our opponents see it, the problem isn’t the thugs and murderers that we face, but our attitude. Well, the American people know better. They know that we are in a fight to preserve our freedom and our way of life and that we are on the side of right and justice in this battle. Those who threaten us and kill innocents around the world do not need to be treated more sensitively. They need to be destroyed.

RUSH: And there was a thunderous ovation at that point. We didn’t play it because it goes on and on and on and on and on. We want to focus on the vice president’s words, but a thunderous ovation, uniformed veterans were in the audience, a lot of them Korean and World War II vets. And here’s Cheney wrapping it up.

CHENEY: I listened to what Senator Kerry had to say in Boston, and with all due respect to the senator, he views the world as if we had never been attacked on September 11th. The job of the commander-in-chief as he sees it is to use America’s military strength to respond to attacks. But September 11th showed us as surely as anything can that we must act against gathering dangers, not wait to be attacked.

RUSH: Yes!

CHENEY: That awful day left some 3,000 of our fellow citizens dead and everything we’ve learned sense tells us the terrorists would do worse if they could and that they will even use chemical or nuclear or biological weapons against us, if they can. In the world we live in now, responding to attacks is not enough. We must do everything in our power to prevent attacks and that includes using military force.

RUSH: There’s a lot of Limbaugh Echo Syndrome in that bite, ladies and gentlemen, from the standpoint of Senator Kerry almost trying to go back to September 10th and run a campaign as though September 11th didn’t happen, and then focusing on what he said at his convention, that every attack will be responded to with appropriate force. What about stopping the attacks, Senator Kennedy — Kerry? What’s the difference, Massachusetts, liberals, six of one, half dozen of the other?

But, you know, the bottom line here is that this is powerful stuff and it was well-received by this audience. There’s a new Gallup poll out, and it also indicates why there is trouble for Kerry on his Iraq flip-flop. It comes as no surprise to find that there are strong partisan leanings on the question of whether it was a mistake to go to Iraq, send troops there. 74% of Democrats in the Gallup poll say that involvement in Iraq was a mistake. 87% of Republicans say it was not a mistake. Now, if 74% of Democrats say that the Iraq war was wrong, Kerry is in some deep doo-doo here, folks. Because he’s out there saying he would have done it, even if there were no weapons of mass destruction.

Now, you wonder, is this going to hurt? I don’t know. It could weaken support for the base. It could give some added, you know, viability to Ralph Nader. You just don’t know. But you could assume that the comment won’t hurt all that much in order to embarrass Democrats, maybe suppress some of their enthusiasm. But they’re really not voting for Kerry anyway. Kerry could pretty much say whatever he wants and it isn’t going to matter because he’s the guy on the ballot opposite Bush. And as far as these 74% of Democrats who don’t think we should not have gone to Iraq, I mean, Mighty Mouse could be on the ballot, and they would vote for him as opposed to voting for George W. Bush.

In the meantime, President Bush yesterday attacked Kerry’s pledge to bring large numbers of troops home from Iraq within a year. The president said that it would embolden the Iraqi insurgency and jeopardize the mission, and he’s exactly right. You tell the Iraqis or the terrorists, ‘Okay, we’re leaving in a year.’ They say, ‘Okay, good. We’ll just blend into the background. We’ll go silent for a while, make you think you can maybe even leave even sooner, and then when you skedaddle and get out of here. We’ll move in and take over the country.’ Sort of like what happened in Vietnam, Senator Kerry.

President Bush said the mission is not going to be completed as quickly as possible if the enemy thinks that we’re going to be moving a substantial number of troops in six months. Then the president said, ‘I know what I’m doing when it comes to winning this war, and I’m not going to be sending mixed signals.’ Kerry can’t help it. That is his personality, to be liked by everybody, to be on all sides of every issue so he can’t be pinned down on one particular point that he’s made about an issue. That’s part of the reason he could be tough to debate.

(EIB PROFIT CENTER TIME-OUT)

Natives are getting restless out there, ladies and gentlemen, over John Kerry’s flip-flopping on Iraq, and you knew it was going to happen. And when I say natives are getting restless it’s getting antsy out there. They’re getting antsy in the media, and if that starts happening, if that spreads, if they get antsy in the elite media and these people start writing complaints, columns of complaint and, ‘Gee, why don’t you to straighten up and fly right,’ then it will trickle down to the base. I just have an example today from the Chicago Tribune it’s by Steve Chapman, ‘Kerry on Iraq an Echo Not a Choice.’ Ooooh! (Laughing.)

‘John Kerry is a man of great personal courage,’ Mr. Chapman begins, ‘which served him well as a naval officer in the Vietnam War but the man who takes the inaugural oath next January will not be asked to lead a bayonet charge. A more vital quality in a president is moral courage, and trying to detect evidence of that attribute in Kerry is like expecting Mikhail Baryshnikov to show up at the county fair. The latest proof that Kerry’s backbone is made of goose down. I’m not sure, as I read this again that Mr. Chapman is a liberal. But we’ll keep reading.

‘The latest proof that Kerry’s backbone is made of goose down is his statement that even if he had known what he knows about now Iraq’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction I’m back to thinking he’s a liberal. And mythical relationship with Al-Qaeda I’m really thinking he’s a liberal. He still would have voted for the resolution authorizing President Bush to go to war. The Iraq war is shaping up to be the greatest American foreign policy debacle since Vietnam.’ Yep, he’s a liberal! No doubts now. (Laughing.) See, they’re getting crazy. They’re getting nutso out there. He goes on to say the Iraq war has killed nearly a thousand American soldiers and wounded more.

Oh. Oh. Speaking of that, listen to this. Alan Eisner writing in the Reuters: ‘Milestone of 1,000th U.S. Death in Iraq Looms for Bush.’ These guys are counting down the days until the thousandth soldier is killed, my friends!

‘The United States faces a painful moment probably next month when its military deaths in Iraq were expected to surpass one thousand. It will also be a crucial moment for President Bush who faces a presidential campaign in which Iraq is a central issue.’

This is John Zogby quoted here in this story, a pollster, ‘The Iraqi body count hurts the president, already less than half of respondents in my polling say the war was worth fighting and the 1,000th casualty will be a milestone that will be page one news and put a lot more focus on it,’ said pollster John Zogby. A pollster now predicting. Orchestrating? What will be page one news? So the media sitting around for that big day, the big moment, when the bell rings and the official tally is in, soldier number 1,000 dead in Iraq. Is this not the most vile, gleeful planning you have heard of yet? A Bush barb based on waiting for troop deaths? And, lo and behold, here it is in Mr. Chapman’s piece. This is why you libs, you’re sitting around celebrating this or calling a milestone, a millstone around Bush’s neck in which you can hang him? You think the American people are looking forward to counting the number of deaths in a war?

The fact that that is the news that’s going to inspire and spur people on? This is vile. Mr. Chapman in the Chicago Tribune picks right up on it. “The Iraq war shaping up to be the greatest American foreign policy debacle since Vietnam. It has killed nearly 1,000 American soldiers, while tying down 140,000 troops whose numbers are inadequate for the challenge. Its price tag has reached 150 billion with more costs to come.”

And he goes on to talk about how he thinks it’s a bad war. “It’s not so hard to imagine what would cause Kerry to recant. Political expedience. The Massachusetts senator firmly believes something he firmly believed when he voted for the war resolution, which is that he should take the politically safe course no matter what. So he’s happy to straddle the fence by criticizing Bush for taking us down the wrong road in Iraq while refusing to say Congress should have stopped him and he figures he can stand by his vote because opponents of the war have nowhere else to turn. But they can always turn to Ralph Nader or they can just stay home. And when it comes to Iraq, after all, Kerry sounds an awful lot like the guy who got us into this mess.”

Now, I’m reading this, this is Steve Chapman from the Chicago Tribune, a noted liberal columnist, and I’m telling you, it’s starting to fray out there. This flip-flop on Iraq is not sitting well, when this starts to happen. This sort of dovetails with the little whisper I got, actually it was last night, the whisper I got that there’s beginning to be a break in the solidarity of the elite media supporting Kerry where the swift vets are concerned. Some of them are very dissatisfied with the campaign’s answers to the charges and the way they’re reacting to this and they think that there may be something there. They think that there may be something the Kerry camp is trying to hide here. There’s not very many of them and I don’t know if it’s going to become widespread in the mainstream press, but there are cracks in the solidarity. And this column here by Steve Chapman is but one indication.

Toward the end of his piece, this sentence: “It has been said by many critics that President Bush, after bungling his job in the Iraq war, has stubbornly refused to admit he was wrong. The same goes for John Kerry.” Whoa! So the left, as you know, has been hell-bent on getting Bush to admit that he made a mistake here. And he hasn’t been willing to admit that he made a mistake. And now, Kerry has made a mistake by saying he would have done exactly what Bush did even if there were no weapons of mass destruction.

Mr. Snerdley, has Bush even said that? Has Bush has said he would go into Iraq even if there were no weapons of mass destruction? Bush has said that, too? So Kerry is echoing a position. Now, you have to wonder, they know where their base is on this. They know what their base wants to hear, and they didn’t get to hear it much at the convention. The base didn’t get to hear what they wanted to hear. I mean they got militarism, they got we’re strong, we’re tough, we’re mighty mice, we have got big biceps here, we can protect you. It’s what they heard and it’s not what they wanted to hear. And now Kerry’s come out and done this. You have to wonder why. You can maybe go back and look at two things. We have heard and we’ve talked over the recent weeks about how the Kerry campaign thinks the election is over. They’ve got it in the bag. They’ve got it out there. And so they can say whatever they want, and Kerry can give himself the positioning he needs to be able to execute whatever he needs to execute when he is in the Oval Orifice.

Or, you can assume that they’ve got some internal polling data that suggests that all this so-called American opposition to the Iraq war ain’t what it is said to be, that there may be a lot more support for the Iraq war in this country than is being reported. And I would draw an analogy to this. Take you back to the debates in 2000. Gore and Bush. I about fell off — well, no, it’s not possible for that to happen, because I don’t sit in a chair. Well, I almost stood up. Let’s put it that way, when I heard Gore talking about how he’s for hunting. And he wasn’t going to take hunters’ guns away from them. This was a Democrat, liberal Democrat candidate for president. And he made a point in a debate of addressing hunters and said he wasn’t going to take their guns away.

I said, “Whoa, what’s this? He’s not been campaigning on this?” Well, we dug deeply, found out there’s polling data out there, and the conventional wisdom is that the whole country hates guns and wants gun control and wants guns taken out of people’s hand. It’s not true. And Gore had to make that admission in the debate. Now we’ve seen Kerry out there with his rifle and musket, and staving off the continental army, whatever he’s doing, trying to make it look like he’s a tough guy, shooting quail or what have you. So we know that issue is not what the left portrays it to be. We also know that abortion is not the issue it’s portrayed to be, otherwise they’d be on that in this campaign. Do you note there’s no domestic agenda that the libs are talking about, other than health care and some of these things. But all these hot button social issues that they thought they owned, they aren’t talking about. And now this. Now Kerry’s out flip-flopping on Iraq, and (Kerry impression), “Yes, I’d have gone in there, I would have done it without weapons of mass destruction.”

I think we’re in the midst — and I’ve said this before — I think we’re in the midst of an implosion, and there’s one thing, folks, that I’ve said this countless times, but I’m going to say it again and maybe rephrase it. Based on what we learned earlier this week about this Gang of 500 and the way they do get together and plan an agenda. There’s even less reason to trust what is in leading elite media newspapers and on elite media newscasts. There’s less reason to trust it because they are agenda-driven. The agenda is the election of Kerry, but the candidate cannot afford to ignore what his own polling might actually tell him. So I’m going to go and vote for option two, that the reason Kerry’s flip-flopping on Iraq is because as hard as Michael Moore’s worked and as hard as all these kook and fringe people on the Democrat left have worked, by no means is this country anywhere near a majority that says get us out of Iraq and we shouldn’t have gone, because if it were, that’s where Kerry would be, and he’s not. He’s on the opposite side.

END TRANSCRIPT

 

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