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RUSH: Keith in Redmond, California, you’re next. Welcome, sir.

CALLER: Rush?

RUSH: Yes, sir.

CALLER: Yeah. Michael Ware is a CNN reporter who’s been living in Iraq and reporting —

RUSH: Yes, I am very familiar with his work.

CALLER: Yes. And he is consistent, anti-American effort in Iraq, so no one can accuse him of being a pro-war conservative. But yesterday on CNN Michael Ware told Kyra Phillips that if US troops leave Iraq, then Iran and Al-Qaeda will take over and own Iraq. And he said, you know, whether you were for the war in Iraq or against it, basically the United States has broken Iraq now, and the United States is responsible for fixing it, and he thinks that the Democrats’ plan to just leave Iraq is absolutely delusional, and maybe you can find that sound bite if you get a chance, but —

RUSH: You know, he said this twice. This is the second time he said this. What’s interesting about this to me is that there are a lot of people saying what he said. General Petraeus is saying it. President Bush has said it. Joe Lieberman has said it. Any number of esteemed Americans have said exactly what Michael Ware said. If we get out of there, it’s the central theme of the debate now. The Democrats own defeat; they want to give up; they want to wave the white flag of surrender. And people are saying, ‘If we get out of there now, it is going to be hell breaking out.’ Democrats say, ‘Oh, no, no, no! It’s not going to get any worse. It can’t get any worse than we’ve made it.’ But the point is this, with all due respect to Michael Ware, why is it that when a journalist says it, everybody stops and says, ‘Oh, oh, wait a minute!’ and why is it that when a journalist who happens to be a liberal at CNN says it, does everybody stop and all of a sudden start listening to this when people have been saying this for months, ever since this pullout and withdrawal debate began?

Nothing against Mr. Ware here. What interests me more is what it is that gets people’s attention. I’m not even talking about you, Keith. Because I noticed it, too. But it doesn’t get played beyond. Other networks are not going to air the commentary of a competing reporter. There’s no question that it may have, with some people, a little bit more credibility because the guy is a well known anti-war and is not a big fan of the United States, and so maybe you ought to listen. But isn’t that a little troubling, in that the military generals and experts are automatically discounted because they’re just Bush lapdogs? They’re just propaganda. So we can’t believe General Petraeus? He’s been trying to tell the media this for the past two days. He’s been trying to tell the Democrats in Congress the past two days. They won’t even go talk to him. Nancy Pelosi won’t even listen to Petraeus. The media’s talking to him and they’re reporting what he said, but there’s no sense that anybody believes what he’s saying. Nobody believes it when Bush says it, and nobody believes it when Lieberman or any other elected official says it.

Who has to say what in order for people to believe it or be interested in it? If whatever is said is correct and right, why is it that only a few people have any kind of credibility, and why is it this one guy has more credibility and gets more attention for stating the obvious? You can take this same bit of thinking to the global warming argument. A lot of people understand the hoax that is global warming. Yet it takes a certain two or three people who might speak up to convince anybody of this. Yet the doomsayers and the hoaxers — I was talking about this last night at dinner, how come people tend to buy into all this apocalyptic doom and gloom, and I went through the riff., ‘Well, people are natural pessimists. Pessimism and doom and gloom are the natural state of the human condition.’ Optimism takes work, being upbeat and happy, content. Most people think those are just things that happen to them and they’re lucky when they happen and the normal state of things is misery, drudgery, unhappiness, angst, tumult, chaos, insecurity, or what have you.

The positive human emotions are not things that seem to happen to a lot of people frequently and so they don’t think they have any control over it. No power to be happy, no power to be optimistic, and that’s only because people are waiting to be affected by things rather than living their lives in a way to make things happen. It’s not a criticism. It’s just the way things are. So when somebody comes along and says, ‘The earth is going to end in a hundred years and it’s our fault,’ people react, ‘Well, I don’t want that. What can I do to save the earth?’ It makes ’em feel happy if they go out and buy a hybrid or change lightbulbs. They actually think they matter. People think they’re making a difference and so forth. How people feel about themselves is going to trump most everything else when everybody is trying to be content and achieve some sort of happiness.

But this statement about what’s going to happen in Iraq if we pull out, it’s obvious to virtually anybody. I’ll tell you who else it’s obvious to. It’s obvious to the Democrats. When they say that it won’t get any worse, they know it will. They just don’t care. Victor Davis Hanson has a piece at National Review Online. He’s getting the sense that the American people finally, really are tiring of the whole thing, the war in Iraq, and his theory is that if it’s true that we’ve reached now the point of no return where more people are just uninterested and have no passion left for it, it’s because, in his opinion, he doesn’t think the American people think the Iraqis are worth sacrificing for. They don’t think the Iraqis and their country are worth losing American lives for. If that’s true, that means we’ve got a big communication problem because this is not about the stability of Iraq, and it never has been about the stability of Iraq.

It is about creating a beachhead of freedom and democracy there in that region. This is a long-term view. I was telling a person I had dinner with last night, they asked, ‘Do you think Bush is going to go down in history as the worst president ever?’

I said, ‘Nope. By the time you and I are dead and historians start writing the history of this period, George W. Bush, in the area of foreign policy, is going to be recognized as one of the top five presidents for actually taking a squalid status quo and American foreign policy and American view of itself in the world and transforming it in meaningful ways as James Monroe did and a couple of other presidents. This is not going to happen in our lifetime because the people who write immediate history are the people that hate Bush.’

But when we’re all gone, folks, the history of what has been attempted here in Iraq (and what will work, by the way), eventually down the line, he’s going to be credited with sticking to it with a great vision. This is also about US national security. This is about doing what we can to make sure we keep these people aiming at us, on the ropes — and they are. They’re aiming at Saudi Arabia now. They’re aiming at Great Britain. I’m sure they’re aiming at us and they hope to hit us again. They haven’t. You might say it’s coincidence, but I don’t believe in coincidence. I think so little that people think is coincidence, is actually coincidence. I don’t think the fact that we haven’t been hit since 9/11 is coincidence. There are reasons that we haven’t been hit, and the reasons are the way we’ve taken it to the people that were responsible for hitting us on 9/11 — and Rudy Giuliani is right: Democrats want to retreat, go back on defense, and wait for the next attack.

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