JOHN KERRY: It depends what you mean by that, Frank. If you mean dying in the course of a United Nations effort, yes, it is worth that. If you mean dying American troops unilaterally going in with some false presumption that we can affect the outcome, the answer is unequivocally no.
RUSH: He’s going to live to regret this. He’s basically saying an American soldier’s life lost under the UN flag is honorable, American soldier’s lives lost under the American flag is not worth it. And it’s because there’s a false presumption that we alone can affect the outcome of anything. This is the one area where John F. Kerry has not flip-flopped at all on his life. This global test, he meant it when he said that in the first debate. He’s going to outsource our national security to the United Nations, and you can go all the way back to 1994 for this most incredible quote. So you have a guy on one side of the aisle, the war on terror, even though we were attacked repeatedly and ultimately on September the 11th, 2001, still will outsource that war and its prosecution to the United Nations.
Now, if you believe like I do that the outcome of the war on terror will influence our world for centuries, then maybe you’ll understand what I mean when I say that the war on terrorism is more important than this election. It’s hard to separate the two. It may be a distinction without a difference in some of your minds, but let me explain what I mean. Once the election is over, and once it’s settled, once the election partisan attacks are over, once the focus group lines are flushed down the toilet where they belong, once real coverage of the war replaces Bush hatred, once Lockhart and Begala and Tad “Perhaps a Tad Too Devine” vanish from the split screens that they call reporting, once the second-guessing, the “I have a plans,” the Algore rants, once all those things end, once George Soros MoveOn learn the outcome of the election, we too can move on to prosecuting the war on terrorism. Now, after this election, the reason I say that the war on terrorism is more important than the election, and again, it’s a distinction without a difference, but I’m trying to call your attention to something here.
Once this election is over, our enemies are going to learn something very important to them. They will learn if they have to deal with our military or John Kerry’s justice department. Our so-called allies will learn whether they have to shape up or whether they can continue to be bought off. The United Nations will learn whether their oil-for-food scandal will be swept under the rug or brought further to light. The search for weapons and biologicals can be pursued without political overtones. In other words, we can get back to the reality of a war on terror here. But if it goes the wrong way, and if the people of this country determine the war on terror is not that big a deal, that the election is more important, and by that I mean 
getting rid of Bush, then our enemies are going to get a big, big lesson that they are gonna love, and that means they’re going to be free to continue to prosecute the war on terror anywhere in the world, because they’re going to know that John Kerry’s justice department is their only enemy. He has said he’s going to use legal means to fight these people, and they’re gonna know that as long as they intimidate the UN and blow up various UN institutions around the world, installations, that the UN will not sanction us going anywhere around the world to fight terrorism and they’ll have a free road. In two weeks from now, Afghanistan will still have voted, and Iraq will still be a few weeks away from voting. The Bush plan in that regard is not going to be stopped. The only thing we’re going to learn two weeks from now is who gets the photo-op, George Bush, the president who made it happen, or John Kerry, the poser who will take credit for it. So we’ve got two more weeks.
I know the partisanship is going to last longer than two weeks, and I know Begala and these guys are not going to go away. But they’re going to go away within the context of an election and the president is going to behave differently than in the context of an election. There are some very serious things up for grabs here. Here’s Dick Cheney yesterday. He was in Carroll, Ohio. Grab audio sound bite number 1 there, Mike. Dick Cheney yesterday. This is a truism that he’s trying to get as many people to accept as he can.
CHENEY: The biggest threat we face now as a nation is the possibility of terrorists ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us, whether a biological agent or a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon of some kind.
RUSH: Cheney was in Carroll, Ohio, yesterday, raised the possibility of terrorists bombing our cities with nukes. Questioned whether Senator Kerry could combat such an ultimate threat. He says you’ve got to be able to get your mind around that, and he’s seen no evidence that Senator Kerry has been able to do that. “The biggest threat we now face as a nation is the possibility of terrorists ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us, biological agents, a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon of some kind to be able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.” That’s the ultimate threat. For us to have a strategy that’s capable of defeating that threat, you gotta get your mind around that concept. The vice president said that Kerry is trying to convince voters that he’d be the same type of tough aggressive leader as President Bush in the fight against terrorism, but Cheney said I don’t believe it. I don’t think there’s any evidence to support the proposition that he would in fact do it.
The only response to this that the Democrats had, was from Bob Shrum. He said, “He has the audacity to question whether a decorated combat veteran who has bled on the battlefield is tough and aggressive enough to keep America safe?” The only evidence they can cite is Kerry’s Vietnam war service, when he served for four months? They can’t cite anything Kerry’s done in the last 20 years in the Senate. Let ’em go to this quote from Frank Sesno’s CNN show. The program was CNN’s Late Edition on April 17th. Kerry says it depends on what you mean by that, Frank. If you mean Americans dying in the course of the UN effort, yeah, it’s worth that. If you mean dying American troops unilaterally going in with some false presumption that we can affect the outcome the answer is no.
I think Cheney is right. We don’t have any evidence that Kerry will do what’s necessary in the war on terror. But it’s hard to tell, other than this quote and the thing he said about the global test. Other than that he’s been all over the ballpark trying to be everything to everybody on this issue. Is it worth the risk? Is it worth the risk?
END TRANSCRIPT
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