RUSH: I had some people over for dinner on Sunday night in preparation for this little charity thing that I did yesterday. One of them was…well, I wouldn’t say a lib, but not quite conservative. The subject of the Democrats came up, and Iraq. Of course, I get all the questions when these things happen, ‘What do you think is going to happen? Do you think the Democrats are really going to pull us out of there?’
I said, ‘Here’s the dirty little secret.’ I know some of you are going to disagree with me on this, and I want you to listen to the full explanation. I am here to tell you that I don’t care who it is, if Mrs. Clinton — who, by the way, has dropped her maiden name again. She dropped
I said, ‘If it’s Mrs. Clinton that’s the next president or if it is the Breck Girl or if it’s Obama, my guess is, they will not pull us out of Iraq. They’re not going to do that. They’re going to still engineer defeat. (Don’t suggest that I’ve changed my mind about the Democrats owning defeat.) You don’t have to be in the White House to secure defeat. They’re doing everything they can to mobilize the enemy. They’re doing everything they can to motivate the enemy. They’re doing everything to de-motivate and demoralize US troops, but primarily you have to understand everything they do is through the political prism. This is all about reacquiring the White House in this massive surge for power that they’re trying to get.’ What I’m saying is… You’ve heard Carl Levin say it, who, by the way, got protested in Michigan. He got protested at University of Michigan at Ann Arbor because he said, ‘We’re never going to de-fund the troops. We’ve never done that. We’re not going to do it now,’ and a couple of other Democrats have said this, too. So what’s going on now is pure show; it’s pure theatrics.
They still haven’t figured out that they are the majority in Congress. You know, they can propose anything they want. They can do whatever they want. They’re still, though, acting like the minority. They’re just saying no to everything. They’re just running around complaining and doing all sorts of screaming like spoiled little brats. But if they get to the White House, if they ever do, you have to think that they know what the real result would be of a massive pullout. What they’re trying to do is get Bush to either, A, do it — and they know he’s not going to pull out, either. This is primary campaign mode, and this is keep their kook base happy time right now. I think there’s a 60-40 chance they would not pull the troops out of Iraq. I mean this. I don’t think they would. They know full-well what’s going to happen to that region if we pull out of there. Snerdley is shouting in the IFB at me, ‘What makes you think they care?’ This is a gut instinct of mine, and I admit I’m being charitable and generous with these people. They think anybody would have to know what happened — if we declare defeat and pull out of there, they would love for it to happen when Bush is president, but not when they’re running the show.
Do you think they want defeat saddled around their necks? No. They don’t think that defeat will be saddled around their necks if they secure it before Bush leaves office. That’s what all this legislation is about. This legislation is set up so that ‘Bush won’t fund the troops; Bush is vetoing our funding bill.’
‘Well, yeah, your funding bill requires a pullout in less than a year.’
‘Well, that doesn’t matter! He says the troops need the money and then he’s vetoing it.’
They’re trying to transfer total authority of the war — again, in a PR sense, or political sense — to the president. They’re trying to eliminate from anybody’s memory that they all voted for it or 80% of them did. They’re trying to eliminate from anybody’s memory that they all saw the intelligence and they all knew what was going on in Iraq with Saddam and weapons of mass destruction. They’re trying to get rid of any of that from as many memories as possible and transfer this whole thing to Bush. It’s his war. Even though they’ve been saying it’s Bush’s war for years, they want to try to effect this in a political sense as best they can.
So in their convoluted world, their way of doing things, they have just passed legislation that would in effect de-fund and bring home the troops. They are going to tell people, and they’ll have their willing accomplices in the Drive-By Media, say, ‘No, no! Bush vetoed the spending bill. We were willing to give him the hundred billion that he asked for, but he vetoed it. So we’ve got to go back to the drawing board,’ and they’ll come up with some sort of compromise on this, but they do not really, when it comes down to it, want defeat secured around their necks when there is no question they are in power. They just don’t. Dingy Harry can run around all day and talk about the war is lost and so forth, but that’s just aimed at George W. Bush. That is aimed at Democrat voters, that’s keeping them interested. He knows the Republicans aren’t going to say much about it, because they’re not even on the playing field. I mean, as I said last week, if the Republicans were fully functioning they’d be running around asking every Democrat, ‘Do you agree with what Senator Reid says? The war lost?’ Make ’em go on record. Then Chuck Schumer started circling the wagons around Reid, ‘Well, no, what he meant was that you can’t win a civil war.’ Did their best to cover their tracks.
When this goes too far, you always have some of the, quote, unquote, ‘adults’ in the Democrat Party back up and try to cover the tracks of the perp, in this case Dingy Harry. Look at David Broder. Broder wrote the most scathing piece on Dingy Harry that has been written about Dingy Harry since the LA Times exposed his land fraud deals out in Nevada. And what happened? They had to circle the wagons around him on that. You know, Broder saying it is not me saying it or anybody from the Weekly Standard or National Review Online or even the White House saying it. When Broder, the 80-year-old dean of DC columnists and pundits says that Dingy Harry is an embarrassment and is incompetent, you saw how they circled the wagons. If they really, really, really wanted defeat while they are in charge and the defeat gets tagged to them, then they would all circle the wagons around Dingy Harry and they would have really beat up Broder and so forth. But what they’re trying to do is just the opposite. I think — and I’m still getting perplexed looks of disbelief from people across the glass at me — if they can secure this defeat with Bush in office, they’ll be happy to do that, but they will not do that when they run the show. They will not.
They were happy to tag defeat to Nixon in Vietnam. They were happy to make that his war and his defeat and his loss and Kissinger’s and all that. They don’t want that themselves. That’s why it’s important to keep hammering on the fact that right they own it, and in the process of trying to affect this political power change they want, they are, whether they realize it or not, helping to secure defeat. They are motivating the enemy. Al-Qaeda knows how to play those guys and our media like Stradivariuses, and they are demoralizing our troops and making them mad at the same time. You know, if they could destroy the will to fight, which is really Sun Tzu, Art of War, that’s one of the first things that you try to do, destroy the enemy’s will to fight. Well, we’re not doing that with Al-Qaeda. We’re building those guys up. We don’t even report death tolls of Al-Qaeda. We don’t talk about any of their failures whatsoever. Why, those guys are omnipotent! They’re everywhere, no matter what we do!’ We killed off this latest leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. ‘Well, there will be another one pop up out of the box.’ The Democrats and the libs say, ‘See? We can’t stop these people. They get ’em from all over the world. We’re doing the wrong thing. Bush is to blame. He started all of this.’
This is all part of the Drive-Bys in this country and the Democrat Party trying to destroy this nation’s will to fight it, particularly by the American people. That’s where they’re trying to secure it. If you look at the way the polls are, 60% of the American people say get out or get out soon or whatever. The Democrats think they’re having success, as does the media. I said this before: the war in Iraq actually has two fronts. Here is a big one, and it’s every bit as big as the front in Baghdad and some of these other provinces where this war is being waged. Al-Qaeda, bin Laden has said this: the American people have lost their will to fight. They can’t take casualties. He made that observation after Mogadishu and the Black Hawk Down episode. Who is it that’s continually trying to create that same mentality among the American people? The Drive-By Media, the Democrat Party! If you keep pounding people with this for four or five years, you’re going to — by virtue attrition — pick a lot of people up.
‘Yeah, we can’t win. Yeah, it’s the wrong war. Yeah, it’s a civil war. We gotta get out of there.’
So you destroy the American public’s will to see this through, and you make it even tougher on the president.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I realize some of you might be confused because you may think I’m changing my tune here on the Democrats owning defeat. Not at all. I’m simply talking about Iraq here and the fact that when push comes to shove — I think you have to keep in mind, they don’t think they are in power, even though they run Congress, they cannot pass legislation. They cannot accomplish anything because they cannot override a veto. So in their minds, attitudinally, they are still behaving as a minority, and a minority doesn’t have to have accountability. In fact, it cannot have accountability. So, they can say whatever they want, as Dingy Harry is doing. If they were to win the White House and if they were to hold onto Congress, either the House or the Senate or both, then a new reality would sweep over them, and they would know everything that happens is something that for which they will be held accountable. By the way, I misidentified George Tenet’s medal. It was the Presidential Medal of Freedom, not the Medal of Honor. But whatever, have you found it on eBay? You looked? You can’t find it. I thought by now his Presidential Medal of Freedom would have been for sale on eBay. Maybe it was and it’s been bought.
Anyway, don’t misunderstand. They’re still pacifists, and they’re still not trustworthy with US national defense. I haven’t changed anything on that. I’m just saying — put it this way. If they happen to win the White House, the next week after they’re not pulling everybody out of Iraq, and their supporters are going to be stunned when it doesn’t happen. They are going to be gaga. Now, the Democrats will talk a good game about it, ‘Well, these withdrawals, they take planning,’ and blah, blah. Then a terrorist event is going to happen somewhere, ‘Well, premature here,’ and they’ll continue to blame all the chaos on Bush, and the mess is far larger than they realized when they were simply out of power. It’s like John Kerry was asked in the campaign of 2004, what are you going to do on that? (John Kerry impression) ‘Well, I can’t tell you. I can’t give you a policy. I don’t know how much we’ve been lied to. I don’t know what I’m going to find there when I get into the Oval Office.’ Same thing. They’ll come up with all the same semantic tricks that they’ve been using. ‘Oh, my gosh, it’s worse than Bush ever let on. We were not told the half of what’s at stake in Iraq,’ and blah, blah, blah. You watch. You watch.
Now, the war on terror is another matter. All I’m saying is they are not just going to unilaterally pull our troops out of Iraq, if they’re still there, in the midst of hostilities where the obvious conclusion would be, we lose. They’re just not going to do that. Now, this went unnoticed at the Democrat press conference last week. John Edwards actually said that he doesn’t believe there’s a global war on terror. He was asked this question by Brian Williams. A lot of Democrats say this privately. I don’t know how many of you, but a lot of Americans think, what war on terror? In fact, there’s a couple of amazing pieces, actually a companion piece to this. Rosa Brooks, who I think teaches something at the University of Virginia, has a column in the Los Angeles Times. (paraphrased) ‘Yeah, the 9/11 attack was bad and they were appalling, but those attacks don’t pose the threat politicians make ’em out to be. There’s no war on terror.’ We’re going to have to get accustomed, she says, to the fact that this is the way of the world now. We’re going to have terrorist attacks all over the world, we’re not going to be able to stop them. And Edwards, when he was asked if he thought it was a war on terror, the candidates were asked for a show of hands on that press conference, he left his hand down.
He says, ‘I believe, and I think this goes to the question you asked earlier, global war on terror, there are dangerous people and dangerous leaders that America must deal with and deal with strongly. But, we have more tools available to us than bombs, and America needs to use the tools that are available to them, so that these people who are sitting on the fence, who terrorists are trying to recruit — the next generation — get pushed to our side, not to the other side.’ But he doesn’t believe there is a war on terror and of course a number of Democrats trying to remove that phrase from the defense budget authorization in the next fiscal year budget, which, if it’s passed on time, will go into effect on October 1st. That’s something they don’t believe, there’s a war on terror. Even though there are terrorist attacks, we chronicled them in our morning update yesterday of all the continued terrorist attacks, Al-Qaeda oriented, around the world. They just refuse to believe it. That is not going to change.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Honolulu, Hawaii, Jim, thanks for waiting. You’re next on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Aloha, Rush.
RUSH: Hey.
CALLER: A little Hawaiian lingo there for you.
RUSH: Well, great to hear it.
CALLER: Your monologue today reminded me of something that one of the Democrat presidential candidates, Mr. Biden, said —
RUSH: Which monologue would that be? I’ve done four.
CALLER: The one about how the Democrats are going to stay in Iraq even if they get the White House.
RUSH: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
CALLER: One of the contenders for that office, Senator Biden, said in his interview last week with Chris Wallace on Fox News, something to the effect of how they will need to keep some troops in Iraq in case an Al-Qaeda camp pops up.
RUSH: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
CALLER: I thought, well, gee, isn’t he basically validating your point about they probably will?
RUSH: Yeah. And he’s not the only one. Now, for those of you just tuning in, this is the worst possible way to hear what I said. This is a big, long monologue, plenty of context and I don’t have time to go through it. You’ll have to check on the website later this afternoon when we update it to reflect the contents of today’s program. I spent about, ten or 12 minutes on this. The Democrats are not going to pull us out of Iraq, not when defeat will be lassoed around their necks. They’re not going to do that. By the way, speaking of Biden, I don’t know where he said this, he said on television that we need to get rid of the incivility. We’ve got to be more civil in our society. Then he said he personally was going to shove the Iraq war bill down George W. Bush’s throat.