RUSH: It’s just so important to have all this at your beck and call. It will be up on the website again so you can immediately retrieve it if you need to do so. We’ll start with audio sound bites, a couple of them that I want you to hear. First off on Hardball last night, Andrea Mitchell — and this is just another little indication that the media is not crazy about what the Democrats did yesterday. They know that it’s phony. They know that it was a trumped-up stunt, and they’re beginning to understand that these Democrats are getting harder and harder to sell, harder and harder to promote, harder and harder to ally with. I mean, they’re going to keep doing it, but it’s getting harder and harder, because at some point when you are allying with people who refuse to accept reality and they are living a lie, daily immersing themselves in a lie, you don’t want to go in that lie with them. Even though they’re your best friend, you try to talk them out of it and steer them out of it — and that’s I think in large part where some of the mainstream media finds itself. Matthews asks Andrea Mitchell, “Is there a legitimate case to be made by the minority Democrats to say, ‘Hey, back when we voted to give the president authority to go to war, we thought certain things were true’? In other words, that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear potential; he was working on a nuclear weapons program, ‘Subsequently we found out he didn’t. More recently we’ve discovered the person who put out that story was a man who’s now charged with lying under oath, as though Scooter Libby was the only guy to put the story out'”? But don’t let the question worry you, folks. The same things that George W. Bush was saying leading up to the Iraq war in 2002, whenever — when did it start, 2003? Whenever it started, the run-up to it, Bush said those things. Well, they were identical things said by Bill Clinton and Democrats, and I’ve got a list of these things, and I’m going to regale you with them in just a second, but here’s Andrea Mitchell’s answer to that question.
MITCHELL: I think it’s disingenuous because they are members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, they are members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Aside from Joe Biden and Dick Lugar, how many of them really looked intensively at it? I think that they didn’t want to look under that rock because they didn’t want to vote against a war at a time when we had been hit by 9/11.
MATTHEWS: A tougher assessment than my own, thank you, Andrea, I think you’re right.
RUSH: Yes. See, she doesn’t want to join them in this alternative reality. She knows the truth, she was covering Bill Clinton back in ’98 and ’99. She was covering Sandy Berger, the National Security Council back then. She knows what they were saying. She knows what she reported back then. So this idea that all of a sudden this intel was trumped up, manipulated, and lied about by Scooter Libby or anybody else… folks, I’m at a loss for words to describe this to you. It is stunning to me they are even making this play, and Andrea Mitchell’s reluctance to go along with this is a great indication of just how much trouble they’re going to have bringing their mainstream allies in the press in unison, along with them on this ride. This morning on CNN’s American Morning, Soledad O’Brien was talking to Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and this is what he said.
ROBERTS: Well, now the issue is back up again. I’m tell you what I’m going to do.
O’BRIEN: What’s that?
ROBERTS: There are a lot of public statements by members of Congress on the Democrat side that are more declarative and more aggressive than anything anybody ever said on the administration side, we’re going to make those public statements public.
RUSH: Amen! Amen! Amen! It’s about time! Instead of running around out there saying, “They hurt my feelings!” We’re going to throw it right back in your face, and I have what he’s talking about right here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers. He’s right. When he said these Democrats made more declarative and more aggressive statements than anything anybody ever said on the administration side, he’s right, because you have to remember the context. The context was 2002, the upcoming elections, the mid-terms. The people of this country were solidly behind going to war and wiping out terrorism because of 9/11. The Democrats had already broken with the president on that. The Democrats thought they could seize an opportunity to distance themselves from that and when they saw the public polling and they saw the eagerness of the American people and they heard the president go through all the presentations to the Security Council at the United Nations they demanded a second resolution. People forget this. They forget this, but I don’t. Shortly after 9/11 happened, the United States Congress gave the president a resolution that in effect was a blank check; he could launch military action at any time, at any place, on any basis that he found necessary to protect this country. Well, they demanded another debate and another resolution so that they could show the American people that they as Democrats were not war wimps, that they were tough, that they were a bunch of Rambos, too, and terrorists were not going to get away with killing us. They demanded it.
They demanded that debate in the middle of the 2002 midterm campaign, and I remember saying to you people at that time, “This is a great rope-a-dope because now they’re not talking about what they think are their ‘kitchen table issues,’ their ‘back-pocket issues,'” health care, education, gas prices, whatever the hell it was back then. No, they had to sound tough as nails on the war, too, and that’s what Roberts means. They made more powerful statements about Saddam Hussein’s danger than the administration was making. You want to hear some of them?
John Kerry, January 23rd, 2003:
His consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction. So the threat of Saddam Hussein, with weapons of mass destruction, is real. John Kerry, January 23rd, 2003. Here’s another statement….
Shall I continue?
This is just but a small sampling, ladies and gentlemen, of words uttered by Democrats from 1998 through 2003 about the dangers posed by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Many of these people — the national security advisor, the secretary of state, the president, the vice president of the United States, were all citing intelligence. Now, would somebody explain to me — and this is why I say the Democrats of 2005 have lost it mentally. They have become pathological. There’s a psychological, deep psychological problem here. Somebody tell me, when this is known, when this is on the record, when this can be found, when anybody can look this up, when there is audio and video of most of these statements, how in the world do you make a case in 2005 that you need to be reelected because the president of the United States in 2002 lied to you, when you yourself, four years prior, three years prior to George Bush uttering a syllable about this, were saying the same things yourself? Carl Levin, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, Nancy Pelosi — these are all the card-carrying leaders of the left’s anti-war brigade today. “Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction! Intelligence was manipulated! We were tricked!” How do you explain your consistency on this issue for five years prior to Bush, three years prior to him even assuming office? That’s why I say, folks, that this isn’t going to fly. The Democrats must still believe that they are alive and well 40 years ago when people like me didn’t exist to go back and look at what they had said.
People like me didn’t exist and there wasn’t the ability to find what they had said because the mainstream media shut down a bit of research or didn’t conduct it themselves into prior statements made years earlier that would contradict current statements, they could get away with what they wanted to. They still think they can get away with it, but they can’t. This is some serious psychological problem. They think they can sell this? They do. They do. They really think they can sell it. They think this is going to launch them back to power in ’06. They were hoping an indictment from Pat Fitzgerald would document all of this, making their job easier so they could launch impeachment proceedings. But ask yourself this question. Let’s just play a hypothetical game. Suppose for the fun of it that they’re right. Suppose Bush lied about everything. Suppose that there was no intelligence suggesting Iraq and Saddam were looking for weapons of mass destruction or ever had them. Okay, let’s say they win this. What then? Has anybody heard a plan from them as to what to do next? If we get the world to admit, “Okay, Bush lied,” then what? Well, you impeach Bush, but then what? Well, there’s nothing, because they have no plan. They don’t dare have a plan. They don’t even know what their plan is. Their plan is one thing: getting rid of Bush and getting back in power. They don’t have any other plan, they don’t have any leadership ideas. They don’t have any substance. They don’t dare debate on substance. It’s just get rid of Bush. It’s get their government back. They had it for 40 years. “It’s not right. It’s not fair. It was stolen from us! They cheated us out of the election in 2000 and 2004 with voting machines, and people who are mean!”
They’re probably even mad that their illegally registered voters don’t get to vote anymore. They’re mad the dead in Chicago don’t get to count anymore. The deck is stacked against them. They used to run this. It was theirs by birthright. It was theirs by entitlement, and it’s been stolen! It’s been taken away — and the last thing they’re going to do is look at themselves and say, “Maybe we’re not appealing to the people on the basis of who we are, what we believe.” No, can’t possibly be their fault. They’re too arrogant, and they’re living in their false reality. But you tell me that these statements — on tape, on video, in print — how they hope to gain an inch is beyond me. It ain’t going to happen, folks. They don’t have a prayer.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: “Rush, what’s your source for all that you just said, all those Democrat quotes?”
Let me hold it up for you for those of you watching on the Dittocam. See that? That’s the Limbaugh Letter, and the date from which I am reading in the Limbaugh Letter is July of 2003, two summers ago. The cover story was “The Power of Trust.” You want to hear some more from our little display of Democrat comments? Try this.
Now, Bush had barely begun talking about things in October of 2002. Bush hadn’t had time to make up a bunch of stuff and lie. October 2002 is about when Bush shared all the intelligence with these people, and you note that Hillary starts talking here about “intelligence reports showed Saddam Hussein has worked to,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. “He has given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al-Qaeda members.” Hillary Clinton in October of 2002. Let her try to reverse field on this, folks. She’s their presumptive nominee. She isn’t going to get away with it. None of them are going to get away with this. It is stunning. It’s like last week when I had the details of media coverage. Judy Miller was being blamed as the sole reason we went to war because the New York Times bought everything that she was saying, and she was lying for the administration because she was doing whatever with Scooter Libby. Well, we went back, Robert Kagan did a piece and he went back and looked at all the media coverage from the same years that these Democrats are talking, ’98, ’99, 2000, 2001, 2002; the media was saying the same things these people are saying that I just quoted for you. So if Bush lied, Clinton had to lie. If Clinton was lying, the media had to know it was lies. If only Bush was lying, nobody else was lying before him but everybody was saying the same thing. Do you understand why, to me, this is not a brilliant stratagem? This is not a brilliant technique.
This is not the Democrats at their best. This is not the Democrats changing the news cycle. This is the Democrats imploding. This is the Democrats truly cracking up. You want to hear more? All right.
Now, what do you notice here? Hillary 2002; Henry Waxman 2002; Bob Graham 2002; John Kerry 2003. (Kerry is running for president) 2002 was the year the Democrats demanded that a new resolution be debated so they could be personally seen as on the record as being really, really hawkish, because the polling data showed that Americans did not trust them, looked at them as linguini-spined little lily livered you-know-whats. So they had to go show they were tough guys, so they go out and make all these statements. Now all of a sudden they want to pretend they never made the statements. No, they don’t want to have to admit they made them.
“Bush lied! Bush lied!”
Right, and here’s Kerry again:
We’re dealing with a real mental illness here.
END TRANSCRIPT