RUSH: Here’s Jay in Stillwater, Maine. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Mega dittos, O magnificent Maha Rushie from the great state of Maine.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I was listening to yesterday’s show and a thought occurred to me. I’m wondering if your profit center has any plans to patent some of these terrific tag lines you’ve come up with. I mean, you know, the ownership of defeat, I’m just waiting for that to be part of mainstream vernacular here in conservative blogs and conservative talk radio, just as the term “invested in defeat” and “Drive-By Media” I hear almost every day or read about it.
RUSH: You know, we don’t trademark these things because we here are like Ronald Reagan. We are not interested in the credit. We’re not interested in profiting off of these phrases in every instance. We have a thriving merchandise business at Club Gitmo and some other things, but it is satisfaction enough for us here to invent and create these popularizations and have them end up throughout the media, throughout the Drive-By Media. We know that we are constantly stolen from on this program, and there’s simply no way to stop it. In fact, we look at it as flattery when we are purloined, ripped off, and stolen from. I appreciate the comment. Speaking of owning defeat and the ownership of defeat. He’s referencing the brilliant and stirring monologue that opened the program yesterday. Just to illustrate how on the mark that was, here’s the latest headline: ?Senate Democrats Move to Limit Iraq Mission.?
Now, we knew this was going to happen because Senator Schumer gleefully promised that it would. Senator Schumer’s out there saying, ?We’re going to resolution this place to death. We’re just going to issue paper after paper, resolution after resolution. We’re going to isolate the president. We?re going to create another Vietnam,? yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, where we lost, and millions died, and Democrats ended up losing elections in landslides for years. Here’s the evidence. ?Determined to challenge President Bush, Senate Democrats are drafting legislation to limit the mission of U.S. troops in Iraq, effectively revoking the broad authority Congress granted in 2002.? See, Murtha has screwed up. Murtha has screwed up big time, because he can’t keep his trap shut. Murtha went out there and divulged for everybody the 
Carl Levin and other Senate Democrats, ?No, no, no, no, no, don’t do that!? But Murtha couldn’t shut up. They managed to get him to shut up before the election. They can’t keep him quiet now. Once he gave up the marketing plan, people are not going to be as susceptible to fall for it or seduced by it. So the Democrats in the Senate think they have to take over. Their plan now, as they own defeat, is to go back and say that the 2002 resolution of force that they all signed authorizing the resolution or authorizing the use of force that they granted in 2002 should be revoked, that they want to go do this. This is going to lead to another constitutional challenge, perhaps crisis — the word “crisis” is overdone, although this may lead to one. Because do they have the right to do this? Do they have the right to undeclare? They do in one way. They could de-fund. They could strip the money out of the operation. But note that they don’t have the guts to do that. And why? Because they know, despite what polling data they’re following, the American people do not want soldiers undercut on the battlefield by having the money pulled out. They do not want that. They haven’t got the guts to really follow through on what they want to happen.
So they’re going to try now to revoke the use-of-force authorization that they demanded. Everybody keeps forgetting this. The Democrats demanded this in October of 2002. I’ll never forget it, because it led into the Wellstone memorial. It led into a number of political blunders that took their big election issues of domestic issues, kitchen table, pocketbook issues off the table. They knew the American people were rah-rah, the American people still firmly remembering 9/11. The Democrats did not want to be seen as doves. They didn’t want to be seen as anti-military. So they demanded a new resolution even though they had given the president one after 9/11. They demanded the one they now seek to revoke. The precise wording remains unsettled. One draft would restrict American troops in Iraq to combating Al-Qaeda. So the Senate Democrats want the Senate to be able to tell our troops who they can shoot at, who they can fire back at, how they can respond. The Constitution will not permit this. They are not the commander-in-chief. They’re going to try it; it’s going to be interesting, but what does it all add up to? They want defeat because they own it.
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RUSH: I don’t know that anybody else has caught this apparent contradiction. Could well be that somebody has. Cheney is out there and basically he said today that the Pelosi-Murtha strategy would reward the terrorists. It would validate Al-Qaeda’s strategery to convince the American people that we can’t win, to cut-and-run, get out of there. That’s exactly what they want, and they take umbrage with this. Pelosi, ?He’s challenging my patriotism,? blah-blah-blah-blah, and she got on the phone like a little spoiled brat and tried to call Bush (crying), ?You make him stop! You make him stop!?
Of course, Bush didn’t take the call. Josh Bolten, chief of staff, got to play Romper Room teacher that day when Pelosi called. The Democrats, ?It?s time to turn this all over to the Iraqis, entirely. Make them step up. Time that with our withdrawal so that the fight against the terrorists is maintained. That would be a good thing.? Now, Tony Blair comes along and says, ?I think it’s time for us to leave, a phased withdrawal, part of the scheduled leaving.? And the Drive-Bys are ecstatic. Then all of a sudden they get panicked. ?Wait a minute, wait a minute, he’s going to leave Basra?? All of a sudden now Basra is a hotbed of activity that we now learn, but for some reason escaped the front page of the New York Times and the rest of the Drive-Bys for all this time? And all of a sudden the same Drive-Bys and the Democrats are saying, ?Hey, Tony, if you split now, you’re going to leave the whole thing to the Iraqis? That’s going to result in bloodshed and terrorist activity.?
So if the Brits leave, it’s bad. If the Brits leave, if Tony Blair leaves, the only thing good about it is, it signals the bust-up of the Bush coalition. But if the Brits leave Basra, oh, my God, Basra’s going to go to hell in a handbasket. Basra’s going to burn. Basra will be the site of hell and the flames of damnation. Yet if we leave, according to Murtha and the Democrats, that’s not going to happen. Al-Qaeda’s going to pack up their tents and their mosques or whatever and go back to wherever. Has anybody even noticed this contradiction? The Brits leave, all hell’s going to break loose. If we leave, peace and tranquility will survive the region.
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RUSH: This is from the Minneapolis Star Tribune today: ?U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann claims to know of a plan, already worked out with a line drawn on the map, for the partition of Iraq in which Iran will control half of the country and set it up as a ?a terrorist safe haven zone? and a staging area for attacks around the Middle East and on the United States. She said this in a taped interview with St. Cloud Times reporter Lawrence Schumacher.? Now, I haven’t heard the whole interview here. Obviously this is somewhat provocative. But apparently at the end of the interview ?when the discussion turned to Iran and Iraq, Bachmann?s reasons for sticking with the stay-until-victory camp, and her beliefs, stated as established fact, that Iran has reached an agreement to divide Iraq and set up a free-terrorism zone.
?Here?s the extended excerpt: ?Iran is the trouble maker, trying to tip over apple carts all over Baghdad right now because they want America to pull out. And do you know why? It?s because they?ve already decided that they?re going to partition Iraq. And half of Iraq, the western, northern portion of Iraq, is going to be called?. the Iraq State of Islam, something like that. And I?m sorry, I don?t have the official name, but it?s meant to be the training ground for the terrorists. There?s already an agreement made. They are going to get half of Iraq and that is going to be a terrorist safe haven zone where they can go ahead and bring about more terrorist attacks in the Middle East region and then to come against the United States because we are their avowed enemy.? Bachmann did not say how she knew about this plan, nor with whom Iran has made this deal,? which are the questions I had when I read this.
The deal’s already been made? With who? I imagine a lot of people are going to try find this woman and get more details from her. I’m just assuming she’s a Republican, because she’s out there saying, ?Hey, deal’s already been cut.? Who would such a deal be cut with? Iran would have to cut a deal with somebody in the Iraqi government for this. At any rate, whether it’s true or not, whether she knows this, whether she’s been told this, true or not, do you have any doubt that this is what Iran would have in mind? Do you think if we pull out of Iraq the Iranians are just going to sit there and say, ?Okay, we’ll let Iraq develop as it will?? Which takes us to more audio sound bites on the Democrats, who own defeat. The ownership of defeat exclusively held by the Democrat Party. They have the deed. Wednesday in Carson City, Nevada, during a meeting of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, the Democrat candidates spoke. Here’s a portion of what Joe Biden said.
BIDEN: I have legislation now that I’m trying to sell to my colleagues with Carl Levin, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, where we revoke the president’s authority that he was given under the authority to go to war. We redefine it. We say, ?Mr. President, you only can keep troops up to 2008 in the following circumstances: on the border, training Iraqis, and denying Al-Qaeda occupation of territory. What you can’t do, Mr. President, you can’t put them in the city of 6.2 million people knocking on doors in the middle of a sectarian war.?
RUSH: So the Democrats do intend to continue flooding the zone here with resolution after resolution just as Senator Schumer has gleefully promised. Senator Schumer gleefully promised, “We’re going to create another Vietnam,” which is asinine. Nothing good came of anything that happened in the aftermath of Vietnam, including for the Democrats, which they don’t understand. I still contend that the reason they think Vietnam is a big success is because they think it led to them being able to get rid of Richard Nixon, which is what they want to do with George W. Bush. So Carl Levin has this resolution, and they’re going to try to essentially revoke the 2002 resolution that authorized the use of force in Iraq — and this is not going to go anywhere.
There will not be nine Republicans that join them on this. Lieberman certainly won’t. They don’t have Tim Johnson’s vote. And they know this. But they’re just going to keep posing this sort of stuff as a means of trying to isolate the president, keep the pressure on. But more important is the way they’re thinking. They want to micromanage this. They’re admitting it, and they’re proudly doing so. They want to tell the president where the troops can go and where they can’t go. Who they can fire at and who they can’t fire at, when they can fire and when they cannot return fire, on and on. This is not constitutional. I know what some of you people are thinking, ?Well, Congress declares war.? Well, when was the last war we declared? Somebody tell me? World War II is right, H.R. That was the last time we declared war anywhere. Have we gone to war in numerous places since? Hell, yes. Is the president still commander-in-chief when he does so? Yes. He has the War Powers Act. But the Constitution confers upon him the role, the singular role of commander-in-chief. It does not saying anything about the Congress being able to micromanage.
All they can do is de-fund. That’s the power they have, the power of the purse. But if they don’t have the guts to de-fund the war, all of this is just smoke and mirrors, and it’s why I say this equals the ownership of defeat, and this is going to come back and redound to them negatively like they can’t imagine. It may not happen in 2008. But they are sowing the seeds, planting the seeds of their eventual landslide defeat. The American people don’t want defeat. The American people don’t want American soldiers humiliated. The American people don’t want ’em hamstrung or handcuffed. They don’t want them not getting reinforcements. The American people do not want our soldiers not getting needed equipment. They don’t want any of these sorts of restrictions, as long as they’re there.
The Democrats are being misled as is much of this country by a bunch of polling data which is wrong about the attitude of the American people on this. Now, Carl Levin was on Fox News Sunday last week. Chris Wallace interviewed him and said, ?It’s clear and there is precedent. Congress can just cut off the funds, but short of that, what powers do you think the Congress has constitutionally to restrict the president, the commander-in-chief’s powers to wage war??
LEVIN: Well, we authorized him going to Iraq, and we can modify that authorization so it’s not this unlimited authority to the president to use our troops in combat in the middle of Baghdad. We can have a much more limited mission than we authorized. We can modify the authorization in order to provide a much more limited mission, which will remove our troops from the middle of a sectarian civil war.
RUSH: No you can’t. You may think you can and you may try but you do not have that authority, and the president will punt your resolution right out of the park if it ever gets to him. The members of Congress, ladies and gentlemen, cannot stop the president from calling the National Security Agency and telling them he wants intercepts on phone calls involving terrorists. They can’t stop him from doing this. Now, it might make you mad, but they can’t. They can’t do what they’re proposing here, either. FDR was opening the mail in World War II, for crying out loud, and far worse than that. Other presidents have done similar things. The Democrats are whistling Dixie and sowing the seeds of their own defeat.