RUSH: Now, the Democrats are getting comical again and they always are when they’re out of power. That’s when they get absolutely just unhinged, and on Hardball last night with Chris Matthews, guess who they’re trotting back Out? The Punk. Terry McAuliffe. Now, part of this makes me think that Bush has instigated a rope-a-dope designed to flush the Democrats out and embarrass themselves once again, in addition to putting together a deal here for the port sale to the United Arab Emirates on the merits, because when I listen to these Democrats, it’s so easy to provoke these people. Here’s the question from Matthews: “Is this a winner for the Democrats, that the president’s now caught off base with his own party on this issue?”
RUSH: You see? Did you hear any principled opposition to the deal there from The Punk, Terry McAuliffe? For him to say that the Democrats are living in the post-9/11 world and that Bush is living in a pre-9/11 world? (Laughing.) Folks! I mean, it’s comical to listen to these people. George Bush, at least the one thing here he’s consistent on is the Democrats have been saying for four years that Bush is the threat.
“Bush is making us less safe! Bush is the guy that’s spying! Bush is the guy running torture chambers! Bush is the guy opening secret prisons! Bush is the guy spying on American citizens!”
Bush is living in a pre-9/11 world? (Laughing.) We have another one from The Punk. A question from Matthews: “I want a partisan analysis. If the president vetoes this bill and permits the deal to go forward so the emirates company gets to run the ports in Philadelphia, New York, and all the way to New Orleans, is that a win, or is it better to beat the president? What’s better? What would you rather see happen, that the bills veto and overridden, that the president is beaten on this or the president change his mind, what do you think is the best thing here?”
PUNK: As an American, if he vetoes it, I want to see the members of the House and Senate come together to override his veto. As an American for the sake of our safety —
MATTHEWS (interrupting): But doesn’t it show the independence of the Republican leadership on the Hill and make it harder to beat them?
PUNK: I think it’s great, but I finally agree —
MATTHEWS (interrupting): It’s harder to beat Hastert if it looks like he’s not a rubber stamp, right? He’s tough and independent like — turn the entire congressional delegation on Capitol Hill into John McCain.
RUSH: See the fear? No, no. See the fear that Matthews has, that every Republican on Capitol Hill is going to become John McCain in the eyes of the media, who they love and will never criticize? See, Matthews is worried about the politics. If you have been listening all week, folks. I told you that one possibility here — and I don’t know whether this was part of the strategery or not. It probably wasn’t. But it doesn’t matter because it’s still happening. The fact is, the president has set up circumstances here where Republicans, in an election year, can run and campaign in a way that makes them not look like sycophants, makes them not look like toadies that are simply toeing the party line.
It does make them look independent and it also takes away the issue the Democrats think they have, which, amazingly and miraculously, they now think they own the national security issue. It’s absurd. It’s fascinating to watch this play out politically, as well as the actual elements of the deal, but the Democrats are not responding. Well, some of them are. Like Chuck Schumer was on the radio today, and Chuck Schumer was all worried about the “manifolds” on cargo ships that maybe could hold bombs and stuff, and they said, “No, no, no. You mean the manifest.”
“No, no, no.”
He kept talking about the “manifold.” He didn’t even know what he was talking about; he didn’t have his steamship lingo down pat, but now he’s an expert on ocean shipping. He’s an expert on ports. He’s an expert on all this, and everybody has overreacted politically on this, and they staked out their positions long before they knew the details of the deal, partly because they were hearing from so many of their constituents, and as I said earlier: Peter King has admitted this. A good guy, congressman from Long Island, said most of what he’s saying here is in reaction to his constituent response, e-mail and phone calls and so forth, which I understand. I mean, he’s an elected official. He’s a representative. He is supposed to represent the desires of his constituents, combined with doing what he thinks is right.
Sometimes constituents don’t know everything that they think they know, and he is in a position to know more about certain things as are all congressmen and senators than us, than we are. But in this instance, I don’t think members of Congress, on Monday and Tuesday, were digging too deep to find out the details here. Everybody got caught up with the mental image of Abdul and Sahib driving forklifts and running crane operations in these ports and said, “Oh, my gosh! How did this happen?” and I’ll tell you what I think is happening right now. I think more and more of these politicians, both sides of the aisle — the Democrats are not going to abandon their position on this, because they think they’ve now won the House again and think they’ve won the Senate again and the White House all on this one issue.
But there are going to be some Republicans — there are some Republicans; I don’t know this because I haven’t talked to them, but I will bet you that there are some people in the days since Monday and Tuesday that are looking at this and rethinking their position on it. Anybody would, if you look at it. Anybody. If your first reaction was simply knee-jerk and based on the things that we have discussed, when you take time to look into it, as I have done, you have less and less fear about it, and it doesn’t present the evidence that led to the original fear that people had — the original reaction that people had. You find out that the United Arab Emirates is not Al-Qaeda. It’s not a mosque.
He’s a French economist. (We’ll forget that he’s French.) Thomas Sowell loves the guy, too, and he says, “If goods and services don’t cross borders, armies soon will.” Well, that’s not a theory. That’s not a guess. That’s the history of the world, and that’s why I say: Economics and security are linked. They’re not two separate things here. So, again, as I listen to Democrats and I listen to people who have not budged from their position earlier in the week on this, I can’t find anything — and I don’t hear anything — to recommend itself to me to make me say, “You know, that’s right. I’m going to come down on their side of the deal.” Everything to me balances out the opposite way.
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RUSH: Mendham, New Jersey and Phil. I’m glad you called, sir. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Rush, I’m actually sort of hyperventilating, shaking with emotion because this is the first issue I have agreed with you on in maybe recent and middling memory, but I agree with you 100 percent on your analysis because though I think that the administration botched the process by not briefing the Senate early, the people that they had to going with the 45-day statutory process, all of your points about globalism, about not sending the wrong message, about commerce across borders, are very true. The checks are just going to be written about those companies. Nothing has to change on the ground in our ports. The British used to run it, and British nationals were terrorists in the — all of this stuff is true. But I believe that Bush is toast. It’s a Harriet Miers scenario. Now that his base is rapidly withdrawing, and he will never be on a ballot again in terms of the midterm elections that those Republicans are looking at, and the Democrats trying to triangulate this in their favor, I think that either he vetoes and then gets overridden which makes him an even lamer lame duck or he backs out of it to try to conserve any power that he’s got for some future fight.
RUSH: Well, that’s a mouthful. First off, let me thank you for admitting that you finally found something on which we can agree.
CALLER: It’s not an “admission,” Rush. It’s a glad… it’s a “proclamation.” Please.
RUSH: Well, fine. That’s even better. You are calling here to make an official proclamation that you have found something after a whole bunch of years you can agree with me on. That represents progress, because this will not be the last issue. Now that we have formed this bond, you and I, this will not be the last issue on which we agree.
CALLER: Well, maybe. First time —
RUSH: Let’s play. Humor me here. Tell me just one thing. Not because I want to argue with you about it. Just tell me one thing — it could be anything — that you disagree with me about.
CALLER: I think you rode the populist tide on Terri Schiavo, and that I disagreed with you on it.
RUSH: All right.
CALLER: But this populist tide is something that you’re attempting to buck based on reasons that I agree with you.
RUSH: I don’t — but, see, I’m glad you said that, because — I say this all the time. Riding the populist tide is the equivalent of moistening the finger (slurping sound), putting it in the air to find out which way the wind’s blowing. Another way to express it is, the populist tide is, I’m going to say what I think my audience wants to hear, and I do not do that. I have never done it. It’s phony. I would forget what I said once, five years ago, and I’d be caught up as a hypocrite. I just call ’em as I see ’em, and I don’t want to retrace my steps on this as I have recounted too many times already the process I went through here.
I want to take the occasion of your call and branch off. You said the Democrats are trying to ‘triangulate’ this, and, see, that’s their problem. Everything they try to triangulate. Everything! Where is their principle on this? I still don’t know. To them this is nothing more than the latest political opportunity and strategy. Now, there is a Zogby poll out. It’s reported today in the Washington Times, ‘Democrat Voters Low on Enthusiasm — Democrats, after 11 years in the minority in Congress, still can’t get it right with their own voters, a poll shows. By objecting to virtually every initiative and proposal of the Bush administration and congressional Republican majority, Democrats are undermining their party’s chances of regaining the majority this fall according to the Zogby poll. Surveyed 1,039 voters.
‘While leaders like Pelosi and Dingy Harry of Nevada and other visible Democrats in Washington pick fights with Republicans, the Zogby poll shows that 58%,’ five-eight percent, ‘of rank and file Democrat voters say that their leaders should accept their lower position in
So 6% of the Democratic Party, the lunatic fringe, is actually having the vast majority of the influence on the elected Democrats, and I think it’s a fine line, because I think a lot of these elected Democrats are kooks in their own right. They’re wacko leftists, and they don’t need advice on how to be wackos.
They don’t need words dictated to them because they’re capable of uttering these things themselves as we who have been studying them for 40 years know. But the fact is they still get listened to, but it indicates — this poll indicates — that the silent majority of Democrats… Let’s revive that term, the silent majority of Democrats are sitting out there and are not believing what they’re watching and they don’t like it. They are embarrassed when Dingy Harry or Nancy Pelosi stands up and starts spouting off, ‘Bush this! Bush that!’ They’re embarrassed when they hear Carville and Begala. They’re embarrassed when they hear The Punk, Terry McAuliffe, like he was on television last night.
Of course, more people just heard McAuliffe today on this program than they’ll ever hear in two months’ worth of Hardball, and that’s the service we provide Chris Matthews. We expand his audience here every day when we play sound bites. The fact of the matter is that these Democrats are concerned. In fact, there used to be a term for what they’re doing. It’s called gridlock. When the Republicans were in the minority, the Democrats and the media chided them as doing nothing but just stopping the process, just gridlock. It was horrible, it was terrible. Today, gridlock is praised. That’s Democrat principle, and when Dingy Harry shuts down the Senate on a bogus maneuver, just those 6% of Democrats loved it. I mean, it was showing backbone and spine.
They’re destroying this party. They literally are destroying it, and the elected Democrats are kind of caught because, while they agree with the kooks, they’ve also got this big group of Democrats out there that’s not happy about what’s going on, and because their biggest problem is they refuse to be honest with us about who they are, and until they start doing that, they aren’t going to have much of a chance. Every bit of strategy the Democratic Party has today is based on camouflaging who they really are, based on masking what they really believe, because they know that if they were to come out openly and passionately for what they believe right now, they would lose big. So they’ve got to constantly come up with ways to mask themselves to present illusions.
“How can we fool ’em today?”
You’ve heard about these staff meetings that they all have. They go back behind closed doors to come up with their agenda. They have two-hour meetings to find out what it is they believe. They go hire George Lakoff (rhymes with) to tell them how to say what they don’t want to say and get away with it. As a conservative, I don’t need to have a meeting with anybody to find out what I believe. Certainly I can tell you what I believe in robust terms, and you would have no doubt after that in five minutes. It wouldn’t take me two hours in private, behind closed doors to figure it out.
It’s the same with them. They know what they believe in. This is all just a game, and they’re employing the same strategery here with this port deal. They are trying to reverse the notion that they are weak on national security. Well, they are weak on national security. And one issue like this is not going to make people forget what they’ve been doing and saying for five years, or four, particularly since 9/11. They’re out there saying, “Bush is the enemy! Bush poses the threat! Bush runs torture chambers! Bush is spying on Americans! Bush is Hitler.”
Now all of a sudden overnight, “Bush doesn’t care. Bush doesn’t care. He sold the port to some terrorists, but we Democrats, we Democrats are security conscious, and we are not going to let this happen. We are not going to let this happen,” and at the same time they’re out there saying, “We need to build bridges of friendship. We must ask: ‘Why do these people hate us?’ We must find out, after they blow up our buildings, why do they hate us? We need to reach out. We need to build allied relationships.”
But, nope, can’t even stick with that. They can’t even stick with that, because of all of the enemies in the Middle East, the grand Democratic Party, led by Dingy Harry and Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi, has concluded that the biggest threat, besides George Bush, is represented by the United Arab Emirates. Sorry, folks. You just have to laugh.
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