RUSH: Bill in Columbia, Maryland. I’m glad you waited sir. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Thank you very much, Rush, for taking my call. I am a liberal Democrat and I’m also a retiree from the United States Army.
RUSH: Well, congratulations and welcome to the program sir.
CALLER: Thank you. First of all I want to say as a liberal Democrat I think Durbin’s remarks are totally off the wall. There’s not one shred of evidence to suggest that our treatment of prisoners down there has any correlation between Nazi Germany or the former Soviet gulag and I do believe that he should apologize to the Congress. I doubt that he will, but I think that he should.
RUSH: McCain says he will by next Sunday or else.
CALLER: I know, I heard that, but in any case, with all of those things said, though, I still think it’s time to try these guys down there or let ’em go. Now, personally I think they should be tried by a military tribunal, but however one wants to hammer it out, whether it’s by military tribunal or by civilian court in the United States, I think they should be tried and this process should move on. You know, whatever is going on down there, right or wrong, unfortunately is not really so much the issue, but what the rest of the world feels is the issue. The rest of the world, we’re looking bad here, we’re keeping these guys detained for a long time. Try ’em. Either execute ’em or put them back in the general POW population. Stick them in prison forever in the United States, or let ’em go.
RUSH: Well, you know, this is the one thing I have trouble with. I mean, I’d be all for military tribunals, but a number of federal judges have interceded and said that military tribunals will not count, and that they have to be tried in the US justice system. That’s all still under appeal, and that would backlog the justice system even worse than it is now. But the one thing that you said and a lot of other people say that I seriously have a big problem with, and that is this so-called image that we are creating for ourselves around the world. This is no different than what we’ve done any other time during wartime. I think what’s missing here is the notion that we are at war. We’re trying to create a circumstance here where 9/11 didn’t happen, that this is all associated with the war in Iraq, and we had no reason to be capturing these guys and bringing them back here, we had no reason for this. And that’s the wrong context. We didn’t care what anybody thought of us in World War II when we interned those Japanese citizens, 110,000. We didn’t care what anybody else thought of us as we marched around the world ridded the world of Hitler and Mussolini and the rest of the bunch. I don’t understand now why everybody is so concerned. In fact, it’s the other way around. Why are we so concerned about what a bunch of people that don’t grant women full human rights, what they think of us? Why are we so concerned about people who will strap their own kids with bombs at age five and six, send them onto a bus, and blow up innocent women and children? I remember a story from Saudi Arabia, a woman got raped and her father slit her throat because she had dishonored her family by being raped. Why do we care what people like this think of us?
CALLER: Well, Rush, we shouldn’t care what people like this think of us. But I think in order to cooperate with the different intelligence services around the world, even though these guys like the Germans, the British — well, the British, of course, have troops in the Middle East, I think it’s necessary to make some concessions. I mean, after all, we won World War II, not just as Americans, but as allies. Sometimes it’s not always pleasant to have to retreat on a moral front, but perhaps in order to get cooperation from some of these countries perhaps this has become a thorny issue. Maybe it’s time to get rid of this thorny issue.
RUSH: Well, I keep hearing that, too. “We need to get cooperation.” We’re not going to get cooperation from any country no matter what we do if they’re predisposed to hate George Bush or if they’re predisposed to be biased toward the United Nations. World War II, yeah, we had allies. Look at the French. They surrendered. We basically had allies. We had Great Britain. We had a number of other allies, but there were a lot of other nations aligned against us, and we did not make concessions to hold those other nations inclined to be less obtrusive or mean or whatever seems to be the thinking here. This is not just about intelligence gathering. This is about fighting a war and winning it, and this preoccupation of what people think of us, I know in life an individual who goes through life that way will never be who that individual is. You’re going to always be miserable and unhappy because you’re letting other people define your happiness for you, and the same thing here. It makes no sense to me. We are at war, it seems.
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RUSH: There’s a story in the Washington Times: Congress Likely to Define War Detainees.” Oh, that’s even better now. But Biden — in page two of this story says, “We have to deal with the 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, and guess what, general? We’re doing real badly. We’re doing real badly on that part of the war. As a matter of fact, it’s a disaster.” Again, would somebody explain to me why we need to be concerned with a bunch of people who strap their own kids with bombs and send them out to blow themselves up along with others? Who kill and slit the throats of their own daughters if they’re raped? What in the world do we need to care about what these people think of us? I think this is just BS, folks. I think this is just the latest way that they are playing on this America. Everybody in America is in therapy. Oh, yeah, we gotta be worried about what people think. We must be concerned about their feelings and we must find out why they hate us — and this is just what the Democrats think is the best way to appeal to the greatest number of people out there. It’s absolutely absurd. It’s no different than being asked what Hitler thinks of us. “We better not do something! We don’t want Hitler to think poorly of us. We don’t want the Nazis to think poorly of us.”
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RUSH: Tony in St. Louis. Welcome, sir, nice to have you on the program.
CALLER: Hey, African-American dittos, guy.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I just wanted to kind of go back before to another caller who talked about the image, and that just seems to be such a flawed position and I’m so glad that you touched on it and not allowed him to– be corrected for that sort of scenario. Actually, the premise is so reversed that we actually have an image problem if we don’t get tough, if we don’t stand strong. It seems that when we’re, as liberals —
RUSH: That’s exactly right. We act like a bunch of wimps, they’re going to think of us as a “paper tiger,” exactly like bin Laden did at Mogadishu.
CALLER: Exactly. It seems that when we come across with a negative image problem that the liberals say, then all of a sudden everybody kind of cooperates. When we come with an image problem of dropping bombs and kicking butt in Afghanistan and Iraq, all of a sudden Kim Jong ll wants to negotiate. Libya turns over it’s nuclear weapon program. Pakistan all of a sudden exposes so many things that could have killed hundreds and thousands of people. So actually it’s the image problem of not doing anything that we have that’s been time tested to be our fallacy that is more prevalent, and I just can’t understand how individuals would seem to see the opposite as some sort of PR move or some sort of —
RUSH: Well, what they’re really talking about, Tony, is that we need to make moral concessions. We need to make moral concessions in order to be understood, and not to be disliked, not to be hated, or to get cooperation from other intelligence agencies, or goodwill from the rest of the world. Could somebody tell me what is moral about releasing back into the world a bunch of vermin like that which are imprisoned at G’itmo? What is in the world is moral, what in the world is decent, what’s good? Would you let a rapist who’s convicted and in jail out of jail just so his hometown doesn’t dislike you? Would you subject the neighborhood — well, actually we’re doing it. We got sex offenders all over the state here, apparently. It’s the same thing. How do you make moral concessions with people described as I describe them and then further compound it by releasing into the wild, if you will, the dregs of society? This is so cockeyed, folks. It really is impossible to keep up with. I’m going to tell you one more time. I’m going to tell you this oftentimes, as many times as it takes: If you become obsessed, I don’t care as a nation or an individual, if you become obsessed with what people think of you, and if you do things in your life so that people will not think poorly of you or so that people will like you, nobody is going to ever respect you. Nobody will. You may have some phony hangers-on who claim to like you, but they’re going to see you as a patsy. Nobody is going to respect you, and nobody is going to know what you really believe or stand for. If you’re willing to subordinate everything you believe in just so somebody will like you, just so somebody won’t think ill of you, there’s a word for that, it’s called a suck-up. There are a number of words like apple polisher — I’ll keep it clean — butt kisser. Is that what we want our nation to appear like, that we have to run around so afraid of what somebody might think of us that we are not willing to do what’s necessary to protect our own citizens? And, by the way, where are the riots? Where are the Muslim riots all over the world about Abu Ghraib and G’itmo? Where is all this disapproval anyway? Where is it? I don’t see it. But even if it was there, are we going to let that take precedence over protecting our own citizens? To the Democratic Party and the American left, the answer is a resounding yes.
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