RUSH: I want to play these Algore sound bites again from yesterday. I know we put ’em up at RushLimbaugh.com and Drudge had them up for awhile yesterday. They’re all over YouTube. This is just mind-boggling. It’s September 29th, 1992, Algore at the Center for National Policy. Now, he’s the vice presidential nominee at this point. This is in the middle of the campaign. The Gulf War is in the past. We won the Gulf War. But, they’re trying to attack Bush. It was ‘the worst economy in the last 50 years. Bush is incompetent. He should have taken Saddam Hussein out. He stopped halfway there.’
These guys are trying to overcome the image of liberal Democrats as soft on use of the military and this sort of thing. But the point of this is Algore is out there talking about how Bush lied. He’s joining the Democrat chorus. ‘Bush lied! There were no weapons of mass destruction. He fudged the intelligence. The whole thing was made up as an excuse to go into Iraq for whatever conspiratorial reason, to get oil or to have some opportunity to go into Iran later, or to cover up for the fact that we aren’t going to get bin Laden,’ blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You’ve heard it all. On the basis of that and Algore’s, um, (sigh) exhaustive work on global warming, he, of course, has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, as have I. My sponsors are seriously considering sending these three bites to the Nobel Committee. We don’t trust that they know how to use YouTube to see these, because this ought to disqualify and discredit Gore any time in the future on whatever he says. Here’s the first of three bites. It’s nine and a half minutes long. We just culled the three that make the case here from this speech on September 29th of 1992.
ALGORE: Bush deserves heavy blame for intentionally concealing from the American people the clear nature of Saddam Hussein and his regime and for convincing himself that friendly relations with such a monster would be possible and for persisting in this effort far, far beyond the point of folly. Throughout this period, Saddam’s atrocities continued. In March of 1988, Saddam used poison gas on the Kurdish town of Halabja, brutally murdering some 5,000 innocent men, women, and children — and none of us can ever forget the pictures of their bodies, of parents trying to shield their infants, even in death that were in our news media and around the world. The Iran-Iraq war then ended in August of 1988, and Iraq had not prevailed, but neither had it been defeated. As a result, you would think that the administration would give our policies a second look to see if they should be altered. But the Reagan-Bush administration never hesitated even when the news became much, much worse.
RUSH: Keep listening, folks. It just gets better with each bite.
ALGORE: In January 1989 President George Bush was sworn in. Based on plentiful evidence, he had reason to know that his ongoing policy regarding Iraq was already malfunctioning badly. Just last week we learned of a memorandum written in March of that year, just two months after his inauguration, to Secretary of State James Baker, as Baker prepared to meet with a senior Iraqi official in which the author of the memorandum noted that Iraq continued to cooperate with terrorists, that it was meddling in Lebanon, that it was working hard at chemical and biological weapons and new missiles. These are exact quotes from the memorandum to the administration. And most significant of all, in the same month, September of 1989, the CIA reported to Secretary of State Baker and other top Bush administration officials that Iraq was clandestinely procuring nuclear weapons technology —
RUSH: Stop the tape! 1992, CIA credible. The CIA told Bush he’s working on nukes! They have wanted to effectively impeach Dick Cheney over this. They say there was never any ties to Saddam and terrorism, Al-Qaeda was everywhere, even in the United States. Al-Qaeda was in Minnesota, was in Florida. It was never in Iraq. This is just mind-blowing to me. Here’s the rest of this bite.
ALGORE: — through a global network of front companies. Did all of this make any impression at all on President Bush? Did his judgment on foreign policy come into play when he was told that this nation with a record of terrorism, continuing, was making a sustained, concerted effort to acquire weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical, and biological? Well, evidently not.
RUSH: Well, apparently it didn’t make much of an impression on you guys, either, because you dropped it like a hot potato the moment you were inaugurated because you didn’t have the guts to deal with hard issues. This is irresponsible. These people ought to be disqualified. Algore ought to never be on television talking about this again. The media ought to be embarrassed to have him on talking about this. They ought to be embarrassed and every Democrat ought to be embarrassed, listening to this: 1992, 15 years ago, Algore trying to warn this country over the danger we faced from Iraq and the fact that George Bush 41 was doing nothing about it. Of course these guys were inaugurated; they serve eight years. They don’t do anything about it, either — except when impeachment came up, Clinton did give a speech in 1998 that’s almost verbatim what George W. Bush has said about this since 2002. But the Drive-Bys who all know this, want to forget it, want to pretend it didn’t happen because the action line is: ‘Bush sucks. Bush irresponsible. Bush lied.’ Anything that doesn’t move that action line forward for the Drive-By Media is going to be ignored, just like this will be ignored. He will not be asked about this by anybody. If he cares show up on a cable news show, he will never, ever be asked about this. Here’s the third bite to wrap it up.
ALGORE: The text of NSD 26 blindly ignores the evidence already at the administration’s disposal of Iraqi behavior in the past regarding human rights, terrorism, the use of chemical weapons, the pursuit of advanced weapons of mass destruction. Instead, it makes an heroic assumption of good behavior in the future on the basis of an interesting theory, namely, that Iraq would suddenly and completely change its ways out of a fear of economic and political sanctions.
RUSH: Stop the tape. I can’t let this go. These are ones that are advocating sanctions now against Iran. These are the ones that advocate the ‘global test,’ bring the UN in, and let’s talk to our allies and make sure we get permission from them and let’s do sanctions. We must do sanctions, never military strikes! Listen to what he’s calling for now. He’s pooh-poohing sanctions. They don’t work. Bush is stupid for thinking they will, against such an evil guy.
ALGORE: Well, it leaps from the page that George Bush, both as vice president and president, had done his utmost to make sure that no such sanctions would ever apply to Saddam Hussein. … The question is unavoidable: Why should Saddam Hussein be at all concerned about a threat of action in the future from George Bush, the same man who had resolutely blocked any such action in the past?
RUSH: Stop the tape. Yeah, and he probably wasn’t afraid because you guys in your eight years didn’t do diddly-squat but kill a janitor in a missile strike on a Saturday night into an empty building. All of a sudden we elect a guy who is going to do something about this that the UN didn’t do, and now what do you guys do in the Democrat Party? Try to discredit him, in the process discredit yourself, and you end up actually seeking to secure the defeat of the United States in this and the US military, all for your own personal political gain and your party. Here’s the rest of the bite.
ALGORE: To the contrary, Saddam had every reason to assume that Bush would look the other way no matter he did. He had already launched poison gas attacks repeatedly, and Bush looked the other way. He had already conducted extensive terrorism activities, and Bush had looked the other way. He was already deeply involved in the effort to acquire nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, and Bush knew it, but he looked the other way.
RUSH: (Laughing.) This is beyond description. Anyway, I wanted you to hear that again. We played it the first hour yesterday, and you may not have seen it on various websites out there, including mine. So I wanted you to hear it if you didn’t catch it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Chris in Kansas City, Missouri — you don’t have to put ‘Missouri’ up there, Snerdley, Kansas City, Kansas, is a myth. You just put ‘Kansas City’ up. (interruption) Well, there is one, but nobody goes there. Chris in Kansas City, Missouri, hello.
CALLER: Spoken like a former resident. I like to hear that.
RUSH: That’s exactly right. (Laughing.)
CALLER: Hey, it’s a great honor being on this show.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I just wanted to — you know, something I was thinking about, when you brought up the wage issue, and it just seems to me that there’s a labor surplus because of the immigration, the illegal immigration —
RUSH: Well, they say there’s not. What they’re saying is that we’ve got jobs being unfilled.
CALLER: That’s just not true. I mean, to say that Americans won’t do a certain job, it’s true at a certain wage they won’t do that job but if you raise that wage, they will, and you don’t have a labor surplus. What’s going to happen is the wages for those jobs will go up, which is what the Democrats say they want anyway. I just want to say one other thing, that Algore is a big watermelon, you know?
RUSH: (Laughing.)
CALLER: Red communist on the inside, and green on the outside.
RUSH: Green on the outside, red on the inside, yes, yes. (Laughing.) All right. I once had a guy in the timber industry tell me that’s what he thought the environmental movement was, a bunch of watermelons, green on the outside, red on the inside.
CALLER: Algore is the biggest watermelon head I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe anybody takes that guy seriously.
RUSH: Oh, hey, he’s the Fred Thompson of the Democrat presidential field. Everybody is just waiting for him to run — and by the way, did you hear what Clinton said? Clinton was asked if he thought Algore would get in, and Clinton said (Clinton impression), ‘Oh, yeah. I think he’s going to get in. I think you’ll see Gore get in.’
CALLER: You shouldn’t mention Fred Thompson and Algore in the same sentence.
RUSH: No, Clinton said, ‘He’s got his own money. He’s got a lot of money, a lot of his own money and if somebody stumbles out there, somebody slips, then I think he’ll get in.’ Now, who is going to slip? Somebody will (you know somebody will), so he thinks Gore is going to get in. So of the top tier Democrats you’ve got Hillary, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hillary Clinton, you have Barack Obama and you have the Breck Girl. Who else is in? Is that pretty much the top tier, or is there a fourth that I’m forgetting?
CALLER: But you shouldn’t even mention Algore and Fred Thompson in the same sentence.
RUSH: Well, I’m talking about in the sense that the Democrats are unhappy with their field and Republicans are unhappy with theirs, and Thompson, in the Rasmussen poll, he’s tied with Giuliani, six points behind. That’s within the statistical margin of error in I think Bloomberg poll, so — and Gore, you know, he doesn’t poll all that well yet, but he’s the great watermelon hope. Of Clinton, Obama, and the Breck Girl, which of those will slip? Well, you know Hillary is not going to slip. So Obama or Edwards, who’s going to slip?
CALLER: Edwards, of course!
RUSH: ‘Edwards, of course.’ Okay. Bill Clinton’s theory is that that’s when Gore gets in is when one of these people slips.
CALLER: Gore’s got so much to lose by trying to run again.
RUSH: Well, you can’t factor the question of ego out of anybody who runs for president. In fact, you gotta have a strong ego. You gotta think the country can’t get by without you. I think Gore could pick up the anti-Hillary vote, both the smart and the dumb anti-Hillary vote. I think there’s a pining away, especially the anti-war crowd. Of course, once these sound bites of his get out there, any number of possibilities exist. Chris, thanks for the call.