RUSH: ‘Iraq’s Shiite-led government said Tuesday that it had ordered an investigation into the abusive behavior at the execution of Saddam Hussein, who was subjected to taunts by official Shiite witnesses and guards as he stood at the gallows. Officials said a three-man Interior Ministry committee will look into the scenes that have drawn outrage and public demonstrations among Mr. Hussein’s Sunni Arab loyalists in Iraq and widespread dismay elsewhere, especially in the Middle East. In an unofficial cell phone video recording…’ Did you watch that cell phone video recording? I did, too. I watched it about 20 times, kept hoping it would improve, the quality would improve.
I got a little mad because I couldn’t really tell a whole lot on it. I wanted to see the whole thing. There wasn’t one thing about it that offended me. Who are we dealing with here? Whether they’re Shi’ites or whether they’re Sunnis, they are Islamists. My gosh, folks, what are we doing here? We’re becoming the biggest nation of pasifist cowards and wimps that I can ever recall in my close-to-56 years of life. Have we forgotten what…? (interruption) Executions are supposed to be…? Maybe in this country they’re supposed to be solemn, but how many times did Old Sparky not work? How many times did a lethal injection have to be done three or four times? What are we talking about here? Despite all that… Wringing our hands over this? Does anybody know, can we possibly try to keep in context, what Hussein did? Look it, I understand something.
When you’re watching or hearing about, you can’t see it at the time it’s happening, but you’re reading news reports: ‘Saddam hanging hours away. Saddam hanging minutes away,’ and of course you put yourself in that same circumstance. You wonder what it would be like if you were walking to the gallows and of course human nature says, ‘Well, I wouldn’t want to go. I would hope it’s not me! I wouldn’t want to go this way,’ and so forth, and we tend to project ourselves onto people and in that sense they become innocent. They become as innocent as we are. They become mere human beings, and it’s difficult to remember the murderous atrocities committed over 25 years by this guy. It’s also difficult to understand. For me it’s not. Apparently for a lot of people it is. Human nature is human nature, and the Shi’ites are the ones who had been his victims over all these years, the Shi’ites and the Kurds, and there they were with him, and a couple of them in the room lost it.
They were gleeful. They were overcome. I think we forget. We don’t know. None of us in this country know what it’s like to live under tyranny and brutal dictatorship where you can be hanging or shot on the whim of the dictator just because he has the power to do it, and you know what the primary objective of a dictator is? It’s to stay alive, because the dictator knows that he’s the target of everybody that he is oppressing and murdering and their family members and so forth. So he has gotta be constantly on the run, has to constantly be checking the loyalty of people around him, and in order to keep people loyal and keep them afraid… I mean, you serve a dictator, you live in fear. You gotta be killing people indiscriminately and randomly to show that it could be them next. This is the kind of person he was! To say that he deserved any kind of respect, it’s a bit of a stretch, but again, the Iraqis do things the way they do them, and they are not us, and we make the mistake of Americanizing everything.
The New York Times here: ‘Mr. Hussein is shown standing on the gallows platform with a noose around his neck at dawn on Saturday, facing a barrage of mockery and derision from unseen tormenters below the gallows.’ Well, he’s only going to do in a few seconds! So what? ‘Mockery and derision’? Frankly, he deserved a lot worse and he ended up getting it. We make the mistake, folks, of Americanizing all this. We gotta remember who these people are. They are Islamists, some of them very militant Islamists. They are Iraqis. This is who they are. This is how they do things. What happened to Saddam Hussein is simply human nature, given what he did to the Shi’ites all those years. We don’t understand such brutality. We don’t understand such tyranny. Yet we project ourselves onto a bunch of savages and expect them to act like us. They are not!
We think that we are so civilized and that everybody else in the world ought to be as civilized as we are. At the same time, CNN — nor any other cable network — had any problem whatsoever showing the deaths of American prisoners and soldiers. Yet the media cringes over this Saddam video? Turning Saddam Hussein into a sad, sympathetic, unfortunate victim? I tell you, folks, I am really worried. I think we’re losing our toughness. My gosh, can you imagine what would happen to FDR if World War II were being fought today and he interned the 120,000 Japanese (Executive Order 9066), and the things that he did? Well, he’s a Democrat. The Drive-By Media is Democrat. It’d probably be somewhat different, but we’re just becoming a bunch of pacifists. The Supreme Court is saying we ought to import more and more foreign law. Well, why don’t we import Iraqi foreign law when it comes to executions?
Let’s start doing them that way. If we’re going to start importing foreign law at the Supreme Court to decide cases, let’s look at the way they do it in Iraq. Maybe we have something to learn, ladies and gentlemen. Why do we think we have to teach anything to the world when of course our brilliant Supreme Court wants to import other laws from other countries, when they just can’t find what they want to do in our own Constitution, damn it! The Constitution limits their globalist desire. The Constitution limits their ability to get rid of those institutions and traditions that keep us sovereign, and so one of the ways you obliterate the Constitution: import foreign law. ‘We can learn a lot from it,’ they tell us. The New York Times also talked about the ‘evolving standards of decency’ and how they are threatened, because of what happened to Saddam Hussein. Let me translate for you: evolving standards of decency means evolving standards of passivity.
Passivity in the face of evil will lead to mass murder.
They claim to care about casualties, and yet they end up defending the perpetrators of these casualties! The count, the run-up: ‘3,000 American troops, oh, no,’ and, by the way, over the Christmas break, we finally got the story from the Washington Post: It’s not really that many compared to past wars. Did you see that story? It’s not really that many. In fact, it’s hardly any at all, the Washington Post says, during the week where hardly anybody is reading newspapers. But, of course, we care! We care in the Drive-By Media, claim to care about casualties: American casualties, British casualties, Iraqi casualties. But for some reason we never hear any alarm about the people doing it, because to the Drive-By Media, the American left, and the Iraqis and the ‘insurgents’ and the terrorists who are killing American troops are not the perpetrators. You know who the perpetrator is.
Why, they wouldn’t be dying if it weren’t for George W. Bush! Bush is the perpetrator. Why, they wouldn’t be dead. The only reason for reporting the death count is to turn it right around on the US government, to weaken this nation’s resolve in this country’s ability to defend itself so that we take more time and perhaps less action the next time we need to. If they’re really concerned about casualties, where is the concern for the perpetrators? Saddam Hussein was one of the biggest perpetrators of casualties in recent history in terms of tyrannical thugs, and here he is, the recipient and object of sympathy and concern and all of those horrible things. Humiliation! Why, he was taunted. Throw the flag. You get fifteen yards for taunting in the NFL. ‘It’s bad to taunt, Mr. Limbaugh. It’s really, really bad.’ I know. I know, because we’ve lost our toughness. This is who those people are.
We didn’t have a thing to do with this. The US military, the US government is saying, ‘It would have been different had we handled it.’ So? Would the end result have been any different? Would Saddam still have been executed regardless of who administered the punishment? Yes. So what’s the big deal? Of course, the perpetrators are not just George W. Bush. The perpetrators are the interrogators at Club Gitmo and the interrogators at Abu Ghraib. But Hussein somehow escapes the whole notice of being a perpetrator. Did you see the obit in the New York Times? The obit in the New York Times probably ran longer than Gerald Ford’s obit, and of course they did chronicle all the mayhem and the horror and the murder that he conducted, but, ehhhhh! He kind of had a reason to behave that way to keep those three factions, the Sunnis, the Shi’ites and the Kurds all aligned. People say it would have been better if Saddam never left power. Iraq would be in better shape. It’s all Twilight Zone, parallel universe stuff.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Dave in Logansport, Indiana. Thank you for calling, sir. You’re next.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, good to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Hey, my comment to the call screener was this: people forget Benito Mussolini. When he was killed, it was a joyous celebration. The guy was hung upside down on meat hooks. They shot at him; they spat at him, and it’s same thing with Saddam’s execution. It’s the same mind-set of these people that have been under this dictatorship for many, many years. I’ll tell you what outrages me and the genesis of this call. If people want to be feeling bad, yesterday we dropped our son off at the airport. He’s not in the military, but the number of military families that were having to break up when dads were with their little kids and saying good-bye and going to war, protecting us — and people are outraged about that? They need a reality check. It really hit me home for me understanding that we are at war with an enemy and that these are our sons and daughters that are going off. I listen to your show, listened to it, loved it, talked to you once before, but to have these people talk about Saddam’s rights when I see these families breaking up, these little kids crying because dad’s going to be gone for so many months, if not years —
RUSH: Here’s —
CALLER: That, Rush, the media, save for you and a couple of others, have no idea the reality of what’s going on.
RUSH: That’s a sad possibility. It might encompass quite a few people. I think that there are quite a few Americans who refuse to believe the notion that we are at war because they just don’t want to, and they don’t have to. Their lives haven’t been changed, so if they’re not military families and if they choose not to believe that we’re at war, then they will. Of course anything within that context they will ignore, because who wants to deal with that kind of fear or challenge. You have to understand also what is at stake here. The same thing with Gerald Ford, the Gerald Ford funeral. Ladies and gentlemen, if you go back to when Gerald Ford was president, when he pardoned Nixon, he was despised, and they made fun of this man mercilessly. They made fun of him as a klutz, started, of course, by Chevy Chase. He became a walking, talking joke, by the same people who today, or last week, lionized Gerald Ford for one reason: because Bob Woodward was able to produce a tape of Gerald Ford saying a year ago that he thought the Iraq war was a mistake.
So everything Gerald Ford might have done — pardoning Nixon or whatever, that they hated and despised — can now be forgotten because Gerald Ford gave them a 30-second tape with Bob Woodford running the machine saying Bush sucks, essentially, and it’s the same thing with Hussein. Saddam Hussein provides the left throughout the world, with an opportunity to condemn the death penalty and to condemn war and to condemn all of these things. So Saddam, Gerald Ford, they all become vessels. They are not human beings. They become vessels and opportunities for the left and the Drive-By Media to promote their agenda, all under the guise of compassion and understanding and tolerance for human beings and so on. In the process, they obscure on purpose, the reality of in this case Hussein and his atrocities, and they don’t even explore it, they act not even curious, about why in the world this was happening. I mean. Okay, Saddam’s being taunted. All right, Saddam is being laughed at. Saddam is being mocked. He has to listen to people shouting, ‘Muqtada! Muqtada! Muqtada!’ before he goes through the gallows.
‘Oh, why that’s just so uncivilized! Why, how could that happen, Mr. Limbaugh! How could it possibly have happened? How can we let that happen? It’s so uncivilized!’
Uncivilized is what Saddam did! The reaction to it was human nature, and it was four or five people. By all rights that whole country wanted a chance at Saddam, like you described Mussolini, Il Duce, having a whole country fire on him. You could say that the Iraqis did it in a far more civilized way than the Italians dealt with Il Duce after he ‘passed away,’ but doesn’t matter. I still am amazed. Where is the curiosity about why people behaved this way with Saddam on the gallows? It’s as though they have no reason for it. Why, they probably listen to talk radio in Iraq! That’s probably it. They listen to talk radio. That’s where the idea came from! It made them ‘coarse.’ It coarsened an otherwise peaceful (laughing) society in Iraq. (Laughing.) Come on! Look it. You have to understand: they don’t care a whit about Saddam Hussein. It’s just an opportunity to point out the Iraq war was a failure. Bush is a failure. The death penalty is wrong, blah, blah. Gerald Ford hated Iraq? Great president! Fabulous guy! Wonderful guy! We love the guy now. Phony baloney, plastic banana good-time rock ‘n’ rollers all.
END TRANSCRIPT
*Note: Links to content outside RushLimbaugh.com usually become inactive over time.
