RUSH: I am serious to you liberals. If you want to live an 18th Century lifestyle or seventeenth century lifestyle, go off and join the Taliban or join Al-Qaeda or something, but don’t do it here. You are not going to succeed. Don’t give me this. We had a liberal call last hour, sniveling all the way. “What are your solutions, Rush, if you don’t believe in global warming?” You know something? The left doesn’t fix anything, folks. The history of liberalism is it screws things up. It doesn’t fix anything. “We care! We care!” I’m through judging you on your intentions. We all ought to just throw these good intentions out the window because they haven’t led to anything. Bill Sammon has a story here today, and I think I know what’s happened. The left has finally abandoned Cindy Sheehan and they’ve picked up Hurricane Katrina. I mean, we don’t even have an accurate body count yet! We don’t even have a full estimate or accounting of the full scope of this disaster, and already the left is out there doing everything they can to blame this on political opponents. I told you the last hour: I know why this is, but it’s no less repugnant nevertheless. Knowing why they’re doing it because they’re panicked over their 40- or 50-year loss of total control of the country and they see it slipping away, fine and dandy, but it doesn’t justify the kind of things we’re getting — and I said last hour, “I don’t like having to come here and discuss this in political terms, but I do here every day what I’ve done every day that I’ve been behind this microphone: I defend the institutions and traditions that I believe make this country great, and when they are under assault — and I don’t care when — I’m going to defend them.”
And as long as people on the left are going to try to take the occasion of this natural disaster ? there’s nothing manmade about this. Now they’re even comparing it to 9/11! Somebody out there, on some of these liberal websites, “This is even worse than 9/11. This is far worse. This ought to show us that 9/11 was nothing.” It’s worse than 9/11. So you want to compare a natural disaster to an act of war and say this is worse, and we shouldn’t be doing anything about 9/11, it shows our priorities are out of whack? I’m sorry, that is sick. To even come up with… What kind of thinking wants to compare the two? Yeah, you can compare the damage, loss of life, this sort of thing, but to try to draw some sort of equivalence between the two is just beyond the pale. Now, I mentioned that the left seems to have abandoned Cindy Sheehan and said hello to Hurricane Katrina. I got audio sound bites that will back this up. But first Bill Sammon today, in the Washington Times: “Powerful liberal advocacy groups like MoveOn.org are taking a less active role in Cindy Sheehan’s anti-war activities in the wake of criticism that they may have muddied her message.” I’ll tell you what, when MoveOn.org abandons you, you know you’ve gone over the edge. When you can outflank MoveOn.org on the left and embarrass them, you know that you’re not even in sight, you’re so far gone. Now, yesterday, ABC/Washington Post came out with a poll.
Devastating news to the media: 79% of the American people said they were not moved at all by the Sheehan protest. That poll did not appear in the newspaper. It appeared on their website. It was posted at seven o’clock in the morning. I said, “Hmm, let’s see if the results of that poll show up in the newspaper.” Well, the story in the newspaper that I have doesn’t mention that aspect of the poll. All it talks about is Bush’s approval numbers now at an all-time low, but the fact of the matter is Cindy Sheehan has been abandoned. “The groups, which played a major role in her month-long vigil, are scaling back their involvement as she prepares to leave Texas today on a bus tour to Washington. Critics had said that it appeared that Ms. Sheehan had morphed from a mother grieving the loss of her son into a pawn of liberal advocacy groups. For example, the protesters no longer receive strategic and political advice from Fenton Communications, the large left-wing PR firm from San Francisco. That role now will revert to an outfit called Mintwood, a small operation that helped Ms. Sheehan early on. Also taking a lesser role will be MoveOn.org which spent August running anti-Bush TV and newspaper ads featuring Ms. Sheehan. The group, which posted images on its website likening the president to Adolf Hitler, once pledged to raise $2 million to keep Sheehan ads on the air. Despite the effort to return Cindy Sheehan’s cause to a grassroots movement she’s made no attempt to ratchet down her rhetoric. Yesterday, for example, she railed against the reckless commander-in-chief for waging a cowardly and ignoble war.”
She has not moved American thinking on this at all, and so the left is abandoning her. They’re outta there, because Hurricane Katrina has come along, and so what do we have? We got the National Guard story, then we have Bill Burkett, then we have 9/11, and then we have the 9/11 Commission, then we had Richard Clarke, then we had the Jersey Girls, and then we had Cindy Sheehan and Bill Burkett, and they just move from one issue to the next, to carry on the agenda — which is still beyond me. They’re not running against Bush anymore! I told you, I’ve had conversations with people on the left who, you know, for the most part, reasonable and intelligent and so forth. They’re educated, and the last time it happened. I said, “Can I ask you something? Do you care about winning elections?”
“I just want Bush outta there. I hate Bush! We’ve just gotta get rid of Bush!”
“Well, he’s not on the ballot anymore.” I was trying to seriously engage them. “Do you have a plan to win elections? Do you have a plan to go out there and tell anybody?”
“I don’t care. The first priority is get rid of Bush,” and they’re stuck on that, and so that’s why Katrina, Hurricane Katrina, has replaced Cindy Sheehan. I mean, you might see Sheehan pop up when she shows up in Washington now and then, but that won’t be ’til September 24th. She’s only going to be on this bus trip for two days. She’s going to surface trying to protest a Blue Angels air show in Maine sometime in September. September the 9th, I think.
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