RUSH: Mark in Findley, Ohio, you’re next, sir. Great to have you on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Well, thanks for taking my call, Rush. I was just sitting here listening to your show. I’m a lifelong Democrat, about 50 years old, and George Bush was the first Republican I had ever voted for.
RUSH: Hmm.
CALLER: And that’s breaking the mold where we’re at. I just heard on the news today that George Voinovich, our Republican senator, is throwing up some roadblocks for this surge that the president’s proposing in Iraq.
RUSH: That’s true.
CALLER: I just don’t understand. Well, I guess I do understand. But again, being a Democrat, I know what Bush is trying to do. He’s trying to protect us. It has nothing to do with being a Democrat or Republican. So why, why is Voinovich so doggone complicated in this mess?
RUSH: Fear. They are going to be running for reelection someday, and Bush isn’t. They’re looking at polls, and they see polling data that tells them that Bush is hated by 60% of the country and disliked by another 10%, that his policies are not supported at all, and they don’t have the guts to rally around the president because they think doing so will seal their fate and doom them to defeat. What they don’t seem to understand is that if they lose — Voinovich, whoever. There’s a bunch of people. It’s not just Voinovich; I’ll give you the list here in just a second, but if they lose — their primaries or their general elections, it’s going to be because Republicans defect. Ask Mike DeWine in your state.
CALLER: Well, I know we had a big shakeup in Ohio, and that was due to a lot of crazy things that went on here.
RUSH: Well, you had a governor that screwed up things, but here are the other Republicans. You got Sam Brownback of Kansas. You’ve got the ever predictable Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. You have Norm Coleman of Minnesota. You have Gordon Smith of Oregon. Voinovich, as you mentioned, and of course the too reliable Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine. Those are the seven, at least seven Republicans who have said they flatly oppose the troop increase. There will be a troop increase. Some of the troops are already there. This is a symbolic resolution that has no force, really, behind it. They’re not going to de-fund this. This is just getting themselves on the record for future elections. Thanks for the call out there, Mark, it’s great to hear from you and to hear a Democrat speak as you did. It is refreshing, and it provides hope that it can happen.
Tony Blankley today, a brilliant piece in the Washington Times. It’s entitled “Vulture Politics.” We talked about this column that he references, the day the column came out, David Ignatius, highly esteemed journalist at the Washington Post wrote a revealing column last week based on an extensive interview with Democratic congressional leader Rahm Emanuel. In fairness to both Mr. Emanuel and Mr. Ignatius I’m going to quote the noteworthy last two paragraphs in full and unedited, and these are they. ?And here’s what Emanuel doesn’t want to do: fall into the political trap of chasing overambitious or potentially unpopular measures. Ask about universal health care, and he shakes his head. Four smart presidents — Truman, Johnson, Nixon and Clinton — tried and failed. That one can wait. Reform of Social Security and other entitlements? Too big, too woolly, too risky.
?If the president wants to propose big changes to entitlements, he can lead the charge. ‘The secret for the Democrats, says Emanuel, is to remain the party of reform and change. The country is angry, and it will only get more so as the problems in Iraq deepen. Don’t look to Emanuel’s Democrats for solutions on Iraq. It’s Bush’s war, and as it splinters the structure of GOP power, the Democrats are waiting to pick up the pieces.’ Emanuel’s thoughts in the first paragraph expressing an intent for the two years of the 110th Congress to avoid dealing with the biggest domestic problems — health care financing and Social Security — while far short of heroic leadership, at least falls within the zone of conventional, practical, hack politics. Talk about change and reform, but carefully avoid doing anything about it. Although, it is quite something to read that Emanuel’s Democratic Party plans to let the (first?) two years of their congressional majority pass by without even trying to address the health care financing mess — about which the Democratic Party has for so long spoken so loudly and so earnestly. Regretfully, too routinely both parties fail even to aspire to genuine leadership. So be it.
?But it is that second paragraph that sits up and grabs one’s attention. With America at war and our troops dying regularly in battle with greater national danger and death in prospect: ‘Don’t look to Emanuel’s Democrats for solutions on Iraq. It’s Bush’s war, and as it splinters the structure of GOP power, the Democrats are waiting to pick up the pieces.’ (!) This is vulture politics. It is so far from respectable that it brings to mind the admired liberal twice Democratic candidate for president against Eisenhower, Governor Adlai Stevenson‘s, definition of patriotism: ‘What do we mean by patriotism in the context of our times? I venture to suggest that what we mean is a sense of national responsibility ? a patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.’ But Rahm Emanuel’s Democratic Party is so bereft of a sense of national responsibility that he apparently feels comfortable brazenly telling the Washington Post that his plans for his Democratic Party is to not even try to stop things from getting worse in Iraq — so they can pick up the political pieces afterward.?
And that nails it. That’s exactly what they’re doing. It just infuriates us all the more when these idiot Republicans join this charade. The Democrats don’t have a plan for Iraq and they don’t intend to have a plan. They have exactly what Emanuel said. They’re going to let it fall apart. They hope it falls apart as bad as it can. They are the vultures and they’ll sit around and pick up the pieces. Of course, we have brave, courageous Republicans who want to get on board with opposing victory, opposing the effort for victory. This, by the way, is understood in some quarters. Mike Lupica, known as The Lip at the New York Daily News, is their sports columnist. But, lo and behold, today he has a column with nothing to do with sports. He has a column on all the Democrats do is talk, talk, talk, but do nothing about Iraq. It’s quite simple because he misunderstands his boys. He’s a Democrat, he’s a very big liberal, as most journalists, whether they’re in sports, food, movie and television, every journalist, the vast majority of them are libs, especially in sports. It’s almost a hundred percent libs, and he doesn’t understand his team. Doesn’t understand his boys.
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RUSH: All right, Mike Lupica, The Lip. I call him that because he’s got a column in the Sunday Daily News in New York called Shooting From The Lip.
?All these Democrats Do is Talk, Talk, Talk.” Wednesday, January 17th, 2007. “Talk today about Sgt. Liam Madden, a kid from Vermont who joined the Marines after high school and ended up in Anbar Province, who says that you can be a good Marine and a good American and still want our war in Iraq to stop. Talk proudly about Madden of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, who took a petition, signed by more than 1,000 just like him, to Congress yesterday, who just by walking up the steps of the Cannon House Office Building did more than big Democrats such as Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) are doing these days.
“Clinton would rather be photographed with soldiers than do anything for them. The other day on ‘Face the Nation,’ Obama looked like he wanted to hide under the desk when Bob Schieffer asked him if he backed Sen. Edward Kennedy’s bill that would require congressional approval to fund the troop increases that this President has planned. ? One of the reasons Kennedy (D-Mass.) can do what he does at this stage of his career is because he has nothing to lose. Clinton and Obama are different. They are the headliners of the party in power now, but all they do is talk and talk but say nothing meaningful about Iraq. It tells you everything about how much both of them want to be President, no matter what kind of mess they would inherit in Baghdad. This isn’t about ideals with them as much as ambition. Maybe they can explain to the people on the ground now how important it is for them to find a safe place in this debate.
“‘I’d tell you that the Democrats are talking a good game, but they’re not even doing that,’ Madden says. ‘Everybody in Congress has to understand something: If they continue to fund this war, it’s not just the President who owns it. They own it, too.’? Now, Lupica goes on here to speak glowingly about the Appeal for Redress as yesterday’s document is officially called, signed by thousands of active duty military and National Guardsmen and other reservists. It was taken up to Washington to add pressure here to the Congress and administration to pull out, just get out, they’re not going anywhere, it’s silly, it’s stupid. Now, I guess Lupica has some expectations much like the kook-fringe left out there in the liberal blogosphere, and that is the Democrats actually mean what they say. 
“They ran on, ?We gotta get out of Iraq.? They have no intention of pulling us out of Iraq and Mike’s piece here may indicate that more and more Democrats are realizing, ?Wait a minute, this is just talk. It’s just talk. They’re not going to do anything.? In fact, we know they’re not going to do anything, because Rahm Emanuel says so. They’re going to sit around and let the whole thing fall apart just as badly as it can, and try to distance themselves from it with their rhetoric by saying they opposed it, but they’re not going to do anything. They want it to get as bad as possible. That means you have to include as getting as bad as possible whatever risks, dangers, accidents, deaths befall uniformed personnel. The liberals, the Democrats seem perfectly content for all that to happen. So Mr. Lupica, I think he does partially understand, but it’s a rude awakening. We’re talking vulture politics here. It’s about power, it’s not about solutions.
The idealists on the left in the Democratic Party have been fooled again as many of them always are, the Democrats in power, because they thought they were going to really get in there and force Bush to pull everybody out. Now they learn that there’s no effort to do that at all, just a bunch of meaningless resolutions, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. What you have to realize, Mike, is it’s not because of fear, it’s not because they’re afraid to do anything about it. It’s a strategy. It’s a strategy oriented toward making sure this mess gets as bad as it can so that Democrats can run for the office of president and everywhere else in 2008 and score huge. It’s vulture politics. It’s cynical — and this from the people who claim they “support the troops.”
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