RUSH: The president spoke for five minutes today about a little over a half hour ago on the fourth anniversary of the Iraq war. PMSNBC essentially doing another one of their telethons trying to drum up anti-war support and proclaim it a failure. The rest of the Drive-By Media pretty much in the same mode, and the president’s speech, we have some sound bites of it. I wish it were a little bit more upbeat tonally, attitudinally than it was, but I still say that all of these people on the left who have proud ownership of defeat had better start thinking about what’s going to happen when this works. Where will they be; what will they say; and how will they handle it? Because it’s clear that General Petraeus, with only two of the five divisions that are part of the surge or brigades, whatever they are, in place (they all won’t be in place until June) are actually having a lot of success.
We have a couple of interesting competing polls about the attitudes of Iraqis and it’s interesting that the Drive-Bys are ignoring the good poll. We had this anti-war protest in Washington yesterday, and of course it was dwarfed in number by counterprotesters, which is also not being talked about much, if at all, in the Drive-By Media.
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RUSH: Breaking news here from ABCnews.com. Waleed bin Attash has confessed to the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 that killed 17 US sailors. Don’t know if he was at Club Gitmo, but regardless, more fodder for the libs here as they can ramp up this torture talk that they think plays with the American people. To give you an idea, if you instinctively think there are two Americas out there and this is a country that is unlike it’s been in a hundred years, here we are, we are at war, and we have a war on terror going on, and here we had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed admit to planning to being the mastermind of 9/11 and a number of other terrorist attacks. He may have been excessive, he may have been taking the credit for some he didn’t get credit for, didn’t actually do, either he’s got an ego problem or trying to shield his buddies from further pursuit or prosecution, but regardless, isn’t it strange that… we’re talking 9/11.
Forget all the other things, forget the ’93 World Trade, just put 9/11 in your mind. Isn’t it strange that that news was not greeted with any appreciation, celebration? It was greeted with utter contempt. It was greeted by the Drive-By Media with utter suspicion. Was he tortured? I’m telling you, folks, the people on the left in this country own defeat, and they are deathly afraid of any good news because they can’t participate in it. They have gone so far out now in the concept of owning defeat that they can’t afford good news; they can’t afford victory. This is comparable to if somebody captured Hitler or somebody had captured the people from Japan who ordered the bombing of Pearl Harbor. There would have been celebration; there would have been great pride; there would have been a sense of achievement and accomplishment. There was none of that. Everybody in this country is so beaten down that this had no impact.
This is not a comment just on the Drive-Bys. This is a comment on the people, our population, so beaten down by negative news about this that I’ll predict to you that if the surge ultimately is victorious, and if Baghdad is someday rendered peaceful, that will not be big news, either. It’ll be clouded by how long it took, how many deaths were necessary to secure it, no big deal, could have been done sooner, shouldn’t have been done in the first place, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now the guy who pulled down — this a big story, too — the guy who, along with the Americans, pulled down the Saddam statue, he’s apologizing saying he might have made a mistake. Drive-Bys found this guy, I don’t know where he is, but he said, ‘Yeah, I might have been a mistaken. I don’t know. We might not be better off today than we were then.’ I don’t know if this guy Waleed bin Attash was at Club Gitmo, but wherever he was, I’m sure he was tortured, will be the news.
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RUSH: A couple of competing polls about life in Iraq. From The Times Online, UK newspaper, ‘Most Iraqis believe life is better for them now than it was under Saddam Hussein, according to a British opinion poll published today,’ the neocon newspaper reports. ‘The survey of more than 5,000 Iraqis found the majority optimistic despite their suffering in sectarian violence since the American-led invasion four years ago this week. … One in four Iraqis has had a family member murdered says the poll by Opinion Research Business. Only 27% think there is a civil war in Iraq.’ Now, the Drive-By Media are not going to be happy about this. This is going to come as an enormous blow to the cut-and-run brigade in this country to learn that most Iraqis believe that life now is better than under the tyranny of Saddam. By a 61-27% margin, they don’t believe there’s a civil war in their country, which will force the Drive-Bys in this country — this is a respected newspaper, the Times Online — they’re going to have to do something to discredit this poll and suggest maybe that the Iraqis themselves do not know there’s a civil war. The Iraqis may be so stupid. Well, they won’t say that. The Iraqis may be so traumatized and shattered they don’t even recall the plight they’re in.
Oh, by the way, 33% saw effective reconstruction efforts. 67% called them ineffective. The news in it is not perfect, but the vast majority think life is better than under Saddam, and a vast, vast, vast majority think they’re not living in a civil war. However, USA Today has a poll out. ‘Most Iraqis live in fear of violence four years after the invasion. Four years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, nearly 9 of 10 Iraqis say they live in fear that the violence ravaging their country will strike themselves and the people with whom they live. Just 5% say they worry ‘hardly at all’ about the safety of those in their household. The findings are part of a survey of Iraqi public opinion sponsored jointly by USA TODAY, ABC News, the British Broadcasting Corp. and ARD, a German TV network. The full results from face-to-face interviews with 2,212. Iraqis from Feb. 25 to March 5 will be released Monday.’
This other poll, by the way, by Opinion Research Business, talked to 5,000 Iraqis, over twice as many, and that poll shows an entirely different result. At least that’s how the reporting of it looks. So this poll that USA Today published here and did jointly with ABC and the BBC, very good news for the Drive-By Media, very good news for the cut-and-run brigade, very good news for those who own defeat. Be interesting to know exactly where the Iraqis were polled and when, and geographically — if it’s all Baghdad, if it’s throughout the country or so forth. This we don’t yet know.