GOP Moderates Whine to Bush About Iraq, Democrats Offer 60 Days of Funding

RUSH: Well, we have the Democrats. They’re now proposing a new Iraq funding bill. It would fund the troops only through July. Of course, the president’s out there saying he’ll veto that. I’ll tell you what happened: the thwarted attempt to kill soldiers at Fort Dix, which is a dropping-off point for troops being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. A bunch of Republicans showed up at the White House yesterday and there was a word that was cleverly left out by the Drive-By Media in discussing the Republicans who showed up at the White House and told the president, ‘You better get Iraq in gear over there because our support is waning too.’ This is what the Democrats never do. We were talking about this in the previous hour. The Democrats never kill their own. The Democrats circle the wagons and protect themselves. Liberals of all stripes will do this. Well, the truth is, this was moderate Republicans that went up to the White House yesterday to warn the president that Iraq must start showing some gains or their support is going to be fleeting.

The Drive-Bys, I’ll tell you folks, they were orgasmic. They were playing this as though it was the Republicans walking up to Nixon saying, ‘All right, we can’t support you anymore, Tricky Dick. You gotta resign.’ They’re playing it up that way. Of course, these are moderates, and I have a newsflash for you: Moderates are constantly uneasy! They’re always uneasy about everything. The closer we get to their own reelection, why, they’re going to get even more uneasy. ‘Lawmakers said Mr. Bush made no commitment, seemed grateful for their support up to now,’ the moderate Republicans said, ‘and said, a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq can cause the sort of chaos that occurred in southeast Asia after the Americans left Vietnam.’ Now, they didn’t bail. They went up there and they made news on the basis that they threatened the president. They warned the president that they were going to bail.

‘Representative Charles W. Dent of Pennsylvania, a co-chairman of the Tuesday Group, an alliance of about 30 moderate Republican lawmakers, helped arrange the meeting. He said lawmakers wanted to convey the frustration and impatience with the war they are hearing from voters. ‘We had a very frank conversation about the situation in Iraq,’ he said. Even so, the Republicans who attended the White House session indicated that they would maintain solidarity with Mr. Bush for now by opposing the latest Democratic proposal for two-stage financing of war, which is scheduled for a vote on Thursday in the House,’ and that’s a vote to permit funding only through July. That’s a laugher if it weren’t so damn serious. It’s comical. But this is all about Republicans wanting to fly the coop, protect themselves. It’s one of the easiest outs, one of the easiest scapegoats. ‘I’m hearing from my constituents out there.’ You’ve been hearing from them on immigration too and you haven’t done diddly-squat on that! You’ve been hearing from your constituents about a lot of things that you’re not listening to them on. But let them call in about Iraq, even if they are in these great numbers. Since they’re moderate Republicans, they might be.

Then there’s another thing that’s happening, folks. This is not good. I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but you’ve got some Republicans out there saying, ‘We gotta move to the center if we’re going to win the House back in 2008. If we’re going to win the White House, we’ve got to move to the center.’ No, no! Do you know how the Democrats won the House in ’06, you idiots? They ran 12 or 13 conservative Democrats who ran to the right of Republican opponents in these Southern states. People like Heath Shuler of North Carolina. The Democrats knew full-well what they had to do to win the House. They had to get a bunch of conservative Democrats, pro-life Democrats, to run to the right of these Republicans who don’t get it for who knows whatever reason. Those conservative Democrats are the ones that gave us this Stalinist Democrat leadership in the House of Representatives from Nancy Pelosi down to Steny Hoyer, you name it. They can’t pass anything. They can’t get anything done. All they can do is pass these meaningless little war bills — well, they’re not meaningless. I don’t mean to characterize them that way. They’re quite dangerous. But they can’t pass any legislation.

About the only thing they’ve done of note is name a courthouse in Cape Girardeau, Missouri after my grandfather, and the Department of Education in Washington after LBJ. That’s about what they’ve done. All these promises that they’ve made? They haven’t gotten anything done, and yet it’s being portrayed that they’re having romantic success and robust success and all kinds of great things are planned in the future and so forth. You add to the mix the Republicans, moderate Republicans trudging up to the White House for dialogue with the president to warn him that their patience is not limitless on this. While all this is going on, you have people like Mookie al-Sadr and ‘Uncle Benny’ — the Fort Dix Six call him ‘Uncle Benny,’ Osama bin Laden — playing everybody in the country like a Stradivarius. They’re playing weak-minded Republicans like a violin. They’re playing the Drive-By Media. You have Zawahiri over the weekend with tapes saying, ‘Hey, you know that bill the Democrats lost? That proves that Washington is defeated. That proves it.’ I don’t think they even care. I wonder if the Democrats feel that the #2 man to Uncle Benny is on their side praising their efforts, saying, ‘Hey, this proves it. We’ve won. They’ve lost. Washington has admitted defeat.’ That’s exactly what they hoped to get from the Democrats in the last election, and they did.

In the middle of all this are the troops, who are in the middle of the surge. Don’t think they don’t hear about this. Don’t think it doesn’t affect them either. Petraeus, their commander comes to town. Nancy Pelosi doesn’t have time to meet him. ‘Oh no, I don’t have time. I have much more serious things on the agenda. I gotta funnel some money to the company out there close to where my husband owns property.’ Dianne Feinstein, the same thing. ‘We’ve got more important things to do here. We’ve got to bash Bush and we’ve got to politicize the tornado out there, and make America think 10,000 people died and that Bush doesn’t care. The federal government is not prepared under Bush to do anything to protect people,’ so forth and so on. The governor of Kansas got in on this bit. It kind of came back and bit her in the rear end. But all of these things are happening and it’s understandable. It’s understandable in one sense, and that is the Republicans are afraid. In a way you can understand how they’re afraid. They look at the election results of ’06 and they see how the Drive-Bys are given a pass to every Democrat doing anything about anything. They see the Drive-Bys joining the Democrat agenda and they’re looking at their future saying, ‘Gee, what have we got?’

I’m telling you — I hate to say it again because I sound like a broken record — the absence of elected, strong, conservative leadership in Washington leads to all these individual Republicans heading out on their own, bailing out, doing what they can to save and protect themselves, and while in the process of doing it, not in the slightest way understanding what they have to do to actually win. They actually believe that running away from George W. Bush is how to win! This is how the Drive-By’s affect them. They work and live in Washington. They actually think that distancing themselves from Bush and putting themselves out there as ‘warning’ Bush, is going to get them accolades and applause and votes from Republicans in November of 2008. They haven’t the slightest clue how their voters are actually perceiving this. I wouldn’t be surprised if these guys aren’t being victimized by organized phone campaigns and e-mail campaigns from people who say they are their constituents, but are actually from a MoveOn.org mailing list or ACLU or People For the American Way mailing list or what have you.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s Maureen in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Hi, Maureen. Great to have you on the EIB Network.

CALLER: Hey, I’m so happy to be here.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: I heard this morning about the GOP moderates heading over to the White House to, I don’t know, show some kind of —

RUSH: They went over there to warn President Bush that their support was only going to last so long and the Iraqis had better stand up and show some success or they were going to evacuate prematurely.

CALLER: Well, my first thought was they should be going over to the White House to apologize for not going back to their constituents and getting out the right message about what’s going on in Iraq and the larger picture that Iraq represents. What is the matter with them?

RUSH: They’re scared. They’re scared for their reelection.

CALLER: That’s not what I expect from Republicans.

RUSH: (Laughs) Maureen, what do you think the first job of an elected official is and then what do you think the second job of an elected official is?

CALLER: Well, the first job of an elected official is to, you know… I’m kind of a libertarian, anyway, but their job should be to —

RUSH: Get reelected.

CALLER: No, it’s not.

RUSH: We’re not playing idealist here. We’re not trying to become the Miss America Pageant winner. We’re talking about reality. The first job of an elected official is to get reelected. The second job of an elected official is to be reelected — and the third job is to spend money to do it.

CALLER: Yeah, well…

RUSH: Well, yeah, that’s the way it is.

CALLER: Then I’m going to drop out. I’m going to quit voting. I can’t take it anymore.

RUSH: No, no, no! Don’t drop out. That’s the last thing that’s needed. But you do need to understand that these are moderates. You’re not a moderate, right? You’re a conservative?

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: Well, all right. Moderates — have you ever been to the library? Do this for me. Go to the library the next time you have a chance, if you know where it is.

CALLER: We go all the time. I have five kids.

RUSH: Great. Go in there and ask the librarian for the book titled ‘Great Moderates in American History.’ Do it for the fun of it. See what the librarian says. Go to the woman at the front desk and ask her for the book. ‘Rush Limbaugh says it’s called ‘Great Moderates in American History.” I bet you they start looking it up (or they’ll send to you the Bill Clinton section) but there isn’t one. There isn’t one and there never will be a book on great moderates in American history. I’m not trying to turn you off from voting. Not in the slightest. Don’t do that.