Enough Pessimism!

RUSH: You know, permit me a couple of observations here, if I may, uh, ladies and gentlemen. First place, can we get rid of this term “the resistance”? Could we ban such terms as “guerrillas” and such? Could we just call these people who they are? They are terrorists! And, of course, they’re gathering in Iraq. This is a battlefield. It’s a good thing they’re gathering in Iraq, and of course they’re trying to recruit people. Could we also stipulate here that war is hard? Could we remind you that two years after World War II ended, the Werewolves were still trying to disrupt our forces and the forces for good in Germany, and these were part of the old SS organized long before the defeat of Germany in World War II. We were in Germany seven or eight years postwar occupying it and getting it ready to go. The thing that bothers me most, though, about this… Well, I don’t know if it bothers me. The thing I’d like to say most about this is there is so much in this country to be grateful for; there is so much in this country to be happy about.
This constant refrain of, “We can’t do it. We are failing,” and, “We’re going to lose,” does not square with American history, and I for one am fed up with this pessimism and I have been for quite awhile. I know news is made up of what goes wrong every day, not what goes right, by definition, but by the same token, it all doesn’t go bad. Not everything is going bad. Certainly things go bad in everybody’s life every day. Nobody has a cakewalk through life. Nobody has a bowl of cherries every day. But you always try to find the optimistic. You always try to find the things to be upbeat and positive about. That’s the successful outlook and we as Americans have more reason to do that than any other people in the world, and the idea that there is a whole political establishment here, who is now obsessed with making us dislike ourselves, making us angry with ourselves, making us feel like we’re going to be defeated, is just beyond me when the exact opposite ought to be the reaction.
Allawi’s speech last week should have had this country standing up and cheering and feeling as proud as we have about ourselves in I don’t know how long. We’re doing something really, really good for millions and millions and millions of people, and we’re trying to do it for even more. There’s a permanent infrastructure of this country that is obsessed with doom and gloom, obsessed and committed to failure because that’s the only way they benefit. I’m very happy with Abizaid. I love his answer: just utter defiance of the premise. The great thing Abizaid did here with Tim Russert is not accept the premise, and that’s what you have to do. Instead of arguing the details, reject the premise. “What do you mean, we’re losing? What do you mean, things are going wrong? What do you mean everybody in Iraq is part of the resistance? There’s no resistance!”

What happens is terrorists recruit these kids and they punish them and their parents, and their parents are held at gunpoint. If the kids don’t behave as the kids are told, the patients get killed. Everybody knows how this stuff works. The secret of these beheadings — can we get the truth out about these beheadings? The beheadings, while they are brutal, they’re not aimed at us. Well, partially they are. They love to demoralize us, but you know what the purpose of the beheadings is? The primary purpose — and some of the most popular DVDs in Iraq now are beheading videos. They’re marketing them. They’re selling them. The terrorists are. You know why? Because they’re the best recruitment tools.
There is an underworld element in every nation’s population. There is an underworld element of human debris, and the terrorists want to recruit them. Blood-thirsty, murdering thug killers. Put these beheadings out, say, “Join us and you can do this.” Those videos are primarily recruiting tools. Ancillary to that is the effect that they hope to have demoralizing us. We have to understand the truth of what’s going on over there and just who it is that we are dealing with, and there’s no way of getting along with them, and there’s no way of appeasing them. They have to be defeated. They have to be wiped out. They are among the scum of the earth, and the idea that there are people in this country who actually seek our defeat, which means their victory, is appalling to me.
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RUSH: As promised, a couple more John Abizaid pieces. Meet the Press yesterday, Tim Russert said, “General, I know you don’t want to be involved in politics, but we are in the middle of a presidential campaign. I want to get your reaction to some of the charges and countercharges from your standpoint on the ground. John Kerry said, ‘This is the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ President Bush says, ‘Those comments embolden the enemy and send the wrong message to the troops.’ Do you believe that the debate about Iraq in this country emboldens the enemy and sends the wrong message to the troops?”
ABIZAID: As a military commander, I remain confident in our troops. I remain confident in the Iraqis. I remain confident in the people of the Middle East looking forward to a better future. They don’t want to live the life of Al-Qaeda or a Talibanized society like we saw in Afghanistan. They want to live a moderate life where their children can grow up and have a better life and I think to the extent that we can help them help themselves to that end we will be enormously successful. So is this fight in the Middle East worth fighting? And the answer is, “Absolutely,” and in my mind and in the minds of the young people who are out here fighting and sacrificing it’s absolutely worth it. And we believe that by fighting out here offensively, by helping the people of the region help themselves, we have kept the country free of attack. That doesn’t mean that the country will absolutely be free of attack, but we certainly think that we’ve done our bit by maintaining an offensive orientation.

RUSH: Uh, permit me, uh, ladies and gentlemen, some analysis. Enemy, first of all, to what General Abizaid said and he said it very diplomatically, not forcefully. Well, there was some force behind it but it was not emphatic. But nevertheless the message is clear: They’re doing a good thing. They’re not going to be talked out of doing a good thing. But, you know, the liberals of this country are trying to say, “Hey, we’re not demoralizing anybody. We’re just engaging in the fine art of debate and we’re just practicing the time-honored practice of dissent which is what built this country,” which is a great misstatement of fact. Dissent did not build the country, it didn’t build it, and this notion that we’re just debating, that may be how they want to be perceived, but make no mistake about it: the Democratic Party today is led by people who will do anything to get their power back and if that means a defeat of U.S. forces around the world they’ll take it.
If they can blame that on Bush, if they can find a way to blame it on Bush they’ll do it. You know, I love these people who say, “Well, do you think debate will hurt? This is an open society. We ought to be able to debate.” You know, words mean things. Someone once said that back in the early 90s and it stuck around: Words mean things, and they have also have consequences, and the fact of the matter is here that the troops in Iraq are able to follow the news, and they do so regularly and religiously. The idea that there is no consequence to the words of those who are negative on this. Look it, what did I just read to you last week? An unnamed Democrat aide to John Kerry said, “It took us ten years to turn public opinion on Vietnam. John Kerry has six weeks to do it on Iraq.” What does that mean? Tell me, folks, what does that mean? What does it mean, Mr. Russert? What does it mean, the rest of you?
Just look at this in the context of debate. What does it mean when someone says, “We’ve got six weeks to turn public opinion on Iraq”? It doesn’t sound like there’s a desire to win in Iraq, as Joe Biden tells Allawi Kerry does possess: a desire to win in Iraq. You don’t hear that from Kerry. Kerry doesn’t talk about victory. Oh, he does after he’s reminded he doesn’t. He says, “Well, I do to want win. I want to win. I want victory.” Senator, if you have to tell people you want to win it isn’t obvious, and it isn’t obvious because the opposite is more true in your case listening to what you’ve said than the attitude with which you’ve said it, than your recent utterance that you want to win, but this idea that they’ve got five or six weeks to turn this into Vietnam? The thing about this is you have to have historical context. What is Vietnam to these people? Vietnam is American defeat.
Vietnam proves what liberals think about the military, that it is the focus of evil in the modern world, that the U.S. military causes all these problems. American prosperity leads to all these problems. It’s liberals who begin these conversations, “Why do they hate us so?” and then conclude they hate us because of things that orient us around who we really are, freedom and capitalism. That’s why they hate us, according to libs. We’re too big. We’re too powerful. We’re to prosperous. We have too much freedom. Our military is too provocative. If we would just change who we are, nobody would dislike us. So you can’t convince me that these people hiding behind the skirt that they’re just debating really hope that they don’t win. If they’re debating, they want to win, and what is victory to them? Convincing the American people this isn’t worth it and we ought to get out of there. That constitutes defeat. If you ask me, they can’t have it any other way. They always want it both ways, but you can’t let ’em have it both ways, folks, because what they say and do must have consequences.
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