RUSH: Well, the Breck Girl went to the Council on Foreign Relations today to make a big speech. I knew he was going to do this. We had a story about two or three weeks ago from the Breck Girl in which he first sent this phrase out, this thought out as a trial balloon, but before the Council on Foreign Relations, he repudiated the notion that there even is a global war on terror. He said, ‘Global war on terror is an ideological doctrine advanced by the Bush administration that has strained American military resources and emboldened terrorists.’ In a defense policy speech at the CFR, the Breck Girl, ‘called the war on terror a bumper sticker slogan that Bush had used to justify everything from abuses at Abu Ghraib to the invasion of Iraq.’ This is dangerous, folks. Leads me to something that Snerdley and I were talking about at the last top-of-the-hour break. In the first place, I don’t care what other people say, I have never thought this guy is particularly bright. He may be able to dazzle a jury by channeling the thoughts of a dead baby, and he may be able to reach in there and tug their heart strings and get them to award $60 million or whatever to a client of his. But I’ve never thought that he’s the brightest bulb in the room. I’ve never thought the elevator went to the top floor. I’ve thought he was an order of French fries short of a Happy Meal. This confirms it. This is stupid.
The Council on Foreign Relations, they have some blockheads in there, and they have some pure libs, but some of them are not this stupid to run out and say that the global war on terror is nothing more than a bumper sticker slogan that Bush used to justify abuses. Does he really think that this president wants to go around abusing people? After all that Bush has put himself through, does he really think this is just about something other than national security and the invasion of Iraq? This kind of comment, by the way, is exactly what Bob Kerrey was writing about in Opinion Journal yesterday. This is dangerous stuff. I’ll tell you, folks, let’s move forward to 2008, and let’s assume the Democrats win the White House. If this actually represents their belief system, if there is no war on terror, and if Iraq was totally unnecessary, and if all this administration existed to do was to engage in torture of innocent, downtrodden Islamofascists, then we are in deep doo-doo. Because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, Nancy Pelosi goes to Syria, and the opposition movement in Syria has just been wiped out. Her visit, giving the imprimatur of the United States condoning what Bashar Assad is doing, when we don’t. It’s not our official policy. She goes over there and does this. They’ve just had the rug cut out from under them. The situation at Tripoli in Lebanon, which we haven’t talked about, let me tell you something, and the situation with Hamas and the Palestinians, the Arab world does not want peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis, because that conflict allows the Arabs leaders to tell their populations how rotten the Jews are and how bad America is.
The last thing they want is peace. They’re the obstacles to it. You’ve got the mullahs and Ahmadinejad in Iran who are thumbing their nose at the world and everybody on uranium enrichment every day with repeated threats to wipe Israel off the map. You’ve got ‘the religion of peace,’ militant Islam, running around conducting terror attacks all over the world. They are involved in what’s going on in Darfur where Senator Biden is so eager to get us to go in there and stop the genocide. It is a powder keg, and it’s ready to blow. If it blows over there, we’re going to have to go in somewhere. I don’t care what anybody thinks about this, if something blows up over there… and the fuse is lit. You put somebody in the White House who actually thinks what John Edwards said today at the Council on Foreign Relations, you’re going to just encourage that powder keg over there. The Iranians are hell-bent on controlling that region, including Saudi Arabia. That’s why we’re going to have to go in there. Not because of our love of the Saudis and not because of our love of the United Arab Emirates, where you’ll find Dubai — love saying that word — we’re going to have to make sure that the oil fields in that region do not come totally under the control of militant radical Islamists like Ahmadinejad and bin Laden disciples and so forth.
If the Democrats win the presidency in ’08 and whoever it is believes the same thing Edwards is saying here today, within five years what everybody’s been saying is going to happen in that region is going to happen. It’s going to go sky high because the Iranians, somebody is going to get the impression, that if these guys win we’re not going to stop ’em. There’s no global war on terror, Bush, all he wants to do is torture people. Believe me, the Iranians tried to engineer as best they could supporting Democrats in the last election. So were Al-Qaeda types, al-Zawahiri. They know full well what they’re getting in the Democrats and they know full well what they’re getting when they get Democrats and their buddies in the Drive-By Media. They’re getting a bunch of isolationists. They’re getting a bunch of people who don’t think that there’s any problem over there, other than that problem created by Bush, and once we’ve got Bush out of the equation, it’s going to be peace and light. They’re just waiting for that because they’ll fall for the notion that we won’t do anything, and we will have to do something, I don’t care who’s in the White House, we will have to do something, and it will dwarf what’s happening in Iraq.
If they just get behind this whole effort to try to win in Iraq and establish something over there that could serve some purpose in perhaps putting out this fuse that’s been lit. Do you realize what unity in this country on this whole thing would do to that part of the world? The Democrats and the media would just either shut up or put on their proper patriotism hats and understand that this is in the best interests and the national security interests of the United States, do you realize what unity in our media every day, unity from Capitol Hill, Democrats and Republicans, would do to that situation? Do you think that that invasion is not effervescing and bubbling up over there faster than it would be were it not for the rift in this country. The Democrats and the media are enabling all this hatred for America because they’re spewing it themselves. All this hatred and lack of respect for Bush, they are spewing it themselves. So they give cover to the Ahmadinejads of the world and all the other radicals, the Bashar Assads, take your pick. So mark my words. Democrats win, there’s going to be hell to pay. If you don’t like the war we’re in now, get ready, ’cause this will look like a sandbox skirmish.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Talking before the top-of-the-hour break about John Edwards and his truly dangerous and just ignorant statements today before the Council on Foreign Relations, there is no global war on terror, it’s just a bumper sticker so Bush can go out there and abuse people at Abu Ghraib and to get us into Iraq. Let me tell you how dangerous this is, and how stupid this is. By the way, I want to say this to all of you liberals in the audience. People hate analogies to World War II on all of this, but it works. After World War II and Hitler and all that, people said, ‘How could of this happened? How could the German people have sat back and allowed this to happen in their name?’ Nobody could understand it. The persecution of Jews and others who didn’t fit the Arian Nation ideal, how in the world could it happen? Well, I hate to tell you, folks, it’s happening in the United States right now and that statement by the Breck Girl is just the latest glaring illustration of it. All over the Democrat Party and the American left, there’s no problem in the world. No, we don’t face any real dangers out there. The biggest danger we face, according to them, is Bush. Bush has made the rest of the world hate us.
This is really dangerous stuff. Half of this country or 40% of this country thinks the same thing. Thirty-five percent of Democrats think that Bush knew about 9/11. How can this be? How can we ask the question about the Germans and not ask it about ourselves? When you add this to it, the people that we should be worried about are telling us precisely what they are going to do, and then they do it. They told us that they were going to launch terrorist attacks in this country, and they did it, and they did it on 9/11. So you have that as a glaring example. They’ll do what they say. These are not the rantings of madmen who make the prediction that we face deep doo-doo over this. Muqtada al-Sadr, our old buddy Mookie, has fled the scene from Iraq in the midst of our surge. He’s over in Iran. He’s out there saying, when the US pulls out, we, meaning the Iranians and me, we’re going to move back in and we’re going to take the place over. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is out there saying he’s going to wipe Israel off the map without provocation, just because they’re there, just because his religious belief tells him he’s gotta do it, the 12th imam thing. He’s out there saying he wants to be the ruler of that region.
Nobody’s making this up. Now, if you don’t want to listen to it because it’s scary, if you don’t want to pay attention to it because you think it’s the mad rantings of a bunch of mad people who really would have no intention of doing this kind of thing, they just hate Bush, and once we get rid of Bush then these guys will pipe down, if you really think that, then you’re no different than the German population was during World War II. It’s happening right in front of you, and people down the road are going to ask, ‘How could the Americans let this happen?’ Well, I can give you an answer as to how it might happen. Take a look at the news every day. The Drive-By Media is in concert with the Democrat Party, which is blaming this country for everything. Ahmadinejad may be saying what he’s saying, but it’s our fault because Bush is in office and provoking him. You the American people, for six years have faced a daily drumbeat about how all of this that happened is unnecessary. 9/11, we gotta get used to these kinds of things. But to do in the aftermath what we’re doing is only provoking and making it worse and the rest of the world hates us and it’s all because of Bush. Every day you’re told that the way you’re living your life is destroying the planet — i.e., global warming — you are being inundated, we all are, each and every day with a big anti-American message that some people in this country have taken to heart and believe.
Meanwhile, the enemies that these people think are manufactured and made up are out there telling us what they’re going to do, they’re telling us what their intentions are. They’re not even afraid. Hitler was doing what he was doing in secret. He was making phony deals. He was promising not to do what he did. At least some of the German people had an excuse at the outset. After awhile, they had no power because eventually all of them were going to be come for at some point. But we’ve got no excuse. The only excuse we can have is that we’re so fat, dumb, and happy we’ve got some affluence out there that we can afford not to pay attention, pretend it doesn’t affect us and try to tell ourselves, ‘Ah, that’s just a bunch of madmen ranting over there.’ Bin Laden’s telling us what he’s going to do. He’s organizing Iraqi Al-Qaeda death squads to come to this country. And of course he says it, it doesn’t make the news. If it does, the press has to go out and say, ‘Well, Bush is just making this up to justify his unjust war in Iraq.’ They’re out there saying this. Somebody actually believes that Karl Rove calls bin Laden and Zawahiri and says, ‘I want you to say this today’?
So then the Breck Girl goes up there and says all of this is just a bumper sticker slogan, there’s no war on terror, and there’s none of this. It’s just an excuse for Bush to abuse people at Abu Ghraib and to invade Iraq. So we will have no excuse if we find ourselves involved in this thing down the road because they’re telling us intently and often what they’re going to do. Then you’ve got Hugo Chavez, let’s not leave him out of this mix, let’s not leave our own southern hemisphere out. Hugo Chavez making deals with Americans to subvert our own country. Hugo Chavez is trying to destabilize the entire southern hemisphere. We’ve got one friend down there, big friend, the president of Colombia comes to this country and is totally dissed. He’s cleaned up his country. He’s gotten the influence of the drug cartels tamed; he’s got productivity up; new freedoms and so forth for his people. He comes to the United States and gets dissed by the Democrat Party because he’s a right-winger and they say he used death squads. They refused to meet with the guy. By the way, Hugo Chavez will happily align himself with any enemy of the United States, if he has to align himself with Ahmadinejad or whoever, he’ll do it. It’s all out there. These people are all telling us what they think of us, they tell us what they intend to do, and yet the Drive-By Media pooh-poohs it, or makes heroes out of these guys when they come to the UN. Chavez was a hero at the UN, Ahmadinejad was a pop culture figure who had a lot of curiosity. Imagine Hitler doing the same thing and being treated the same way? You can’t. Wouldn’t have happened. But it is happening now.
I’m going to tell you something else I think. I don’t know anything here about this, but I don’t believe George W. Bush will leave office with the Iranians in possession of a nuclear weapon or two. I don’t believe he’ll let it happen. Do not believe it’ll happen. So we go to our old buddies at ABC, Brian Ross, the CIA has received secret presidential approval. Explain to me now how this is secret? Explain to me how in the world ABC runs this story. Responsible news organization would not run this story, advising the enemy what our intentions are. But they have. Will the justice department go in and try to find out who leaked this? No. They’re too busy trying to nail Alberto Gonzales on something that had no illegality to it, the firing of eight US attorneys.
‘The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert ‘black’ operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com. The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject,’ and perhaps because they were acting treasonously, ‘say President Bush has signed a ‘nonlethal presidential finding’ that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions.’ By the way, the Iranians just raised the price of their gasoline 25%. They don’t want their people moving around. They don’t want their people with any freedom over there. ‘Bruce Riedel, a recently retired CIA senior official who dealt with Iran and other countries in the region, said, ‘I can’t confirm or deny whether such a program exists or whether the president signed it, but it would be consistent with an overall American approach trying to find ways to put pressure on the regime.” All right, so why publish this, if not to undermine the effort? Pure and simple. Now, this is just another thing. Here the president’s trying to do something about it, regardless what you think of what this report is, and the fastest ABC can get it out, the better to undermine it.
Now, the Department of Justice has a national security obligation to make sure that these leaks don’t happen. The way you do that is to find out who’s engaging in them and prosecute them. There are no efforts being made in this regard to find out who in the intelligence community, or wherever it is, state, Pentagon, who knows where it’s coming from, they’re Clinton holdovers and there are career people in there that despise Bush and would do anything to — this is what I mean when I say there are people, leftists, who will tear this country down, tear it apart and rebuild it in their own image if they get the chance. And yet, today there were televised hearings of this Monica what’s-her-face, Gonzales’ aide, yeah, Monica Goodling. Whoop-de-do. This is all an attempt to get Gonzales and get Bush while this stuff is going on. Now, at the same time this is happening, Reuters reports that ‘The largest daytime assembly of U.S. warships in the Gulf since the 2003 Iraq war prepared on Wednesday to hold drills off Iran’s coast in a major U.S. show of force that unnerved oil markets.’ Well, now, what do you think is happening here? Is Bush just doing this so he can torture more people in prisons, justify his invasion of Iraq? That’s what John Edwards told the Council on Foreign Relations today.
‘U.S. Navy officials said Iran was not notified of plans to sail nine ships, including two aircraft carriers, through the Straits of Hormuz, a narrow channel in international waters off Iran’s coast and a major artery for global oil shipments.’ One thing I know is we don’t know everything there is to be known about things like this, and I don’t think Bush is going to leave office with the Iranians in possession of a nuclear weapon. That’s my humble opinion, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. You stop and think about that. I begged Snerdley, I couldn’t wait, I wanted to wait on this riff ’til I had a liberal caller, because we just raked Edwards over the coals, and I wanted to get a lib caller saying, ‘You guys are making this all up. There’s no reason for the war on terror. Edwards and right,’ and I just wanted to fire back, ‘It ain’t me saying it, bud. Have you heard what Ahmadinejad is saying? Have you heard what Mookie al-Sadr is saying? Have you heard what Bashar Assad is saying? Have you heard what Hugo Chavez is saying?’ and then get this liberal’s reaction. You got one? We don’t have one. And we won’t now. We don’t need ’em anyway, I did the riff on my own. I didn’t need a liberal for this.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Have a couple audio sound bites to back up that which I just articulated. Let’s go American Morning on CNN today. The cohost John Roberts. By the way, I know who’s going to be the next hire at CNN. Stoned Phillips. Stoned Phillips was blown out at NBC. Well, that’s what CNN does, they go hire the retreads the networks don’t want and think they’ve hired stars. That’s what John Roberts is. John Roberts used to be the weekend anchor guy when Rather was there. When he didn’t get the Rather gig, he said, ‘My days are numbered here at CBS,’ and so he’s over now at CNN. If MSNBC hires you, you’re finished. Anyway, here’s John Roberts talking about the recently declassified documents the president referenced today regarding bin Laden’s terror plans.
ROBERTS: Did Osama bin Laden personally order the creation of a terror cell in Iraq with the sole purpose of attacking the United States? President Bush will make that claim later on today in a speech. He’s expected to present newly declassified intelligence linking bin Laden to the former leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. What’s the reason that he’s declassifying a part of this and trotting it out in his speech? The information is two years old.
RUSH: See, we can’t trust Bush, even though bin Laden’s already done one time what he’s saying he wants to do again. Of course we’re going to be more predisposed to believe bin Laden and Zarqawi than we will Bush. Bush is making this up. This is newly declassified, and questioning whether there’s any relationship between Zarqawi in Iraq and bin Laden? Zarqawi sent the guy notes, sent the guy mail. We have read them to you, transcripts, on this program. And yet CNN, ‘Why, this was not timely, this is the news, what bringing this up for?’ Here’s an exchange on this that continued, bringing in the reporter Suzanne Malveaux.
ROBERTS: We’ve seen this before, that the president selectively declassifies this information. People are rather skeptical about it because they remember one of the big declassifications —
RUSH: Stop the tape. People are not skeptical about it, you are and then you make them skeptical. Resume tape.
ROBERTS: — which was that National Intelligence Estimate back in 2002, which didn’t turn out so well for the White House.
MALVEAUX: Well, you’re absolutely right, because I mean it really is an act of faith here. We don’t know, viewers don’t know, really the full body of intelligence here, just a select group of people in the administration know, including the president here. So, yes, critics have pointed out the fact that, look, you know, the whole thing with weapons of mass destruction, selective declassification, all of it turned out to be wrong.
RUSH: Okay, so there were no weapons of mass destruction that were admitted to have been found, and so we can’t believe anything ever again, even though we’ve got bin Laden saying this is what he intends to do. We’ve got Zawahiri saying what he intends to do. But the big elephant in the room is they’ve already done it! September 11th, 2001. And yet these nincompoops out there are continuing to try to discredit the president and the country to make you think, they’re making this up, trying to save face, for whatever reason.