RUSH: Here’s an AP story: ‘Few Confident of Border Security — The public has little faith that the government is accurately screening visitors to the country, or could cope with an outbreak of an infectious disease, according to an AP/Ipsos poll. Only one in five surveyed said the government is doing enough to scrutinize people crossing the border into the US, according to the poll. Just two in five expressed confidence that the government is ready for an epidemic.’ Now, why do you think that question ends up in a poll? It’s because of the TV scare that we had when this guy, this airline passenger that recently got married, came back with TB. Guess what we found out? His strain of TB was not nearly, nearly, nearly as severe or rare as all the panic had everybody believing it was when he first got back to the fruited plain — and that’s so typical. ‘Panic! Crisis! We’re all going to die! Is this guy quarantined? Who did he come in contact with? Oh, no! (sobbing) It’s over and I never had the chance to say good-bye! Boohoo.’ It was exaggerated greatly. So that’s how handling an epidemic gets rated. The bottom line is this — and this is why the immigration bill went down the tubes — nobody trusts the government. Few people trust the government to do what they say they’re going to do. (interruption) Who’s a little late on this? The polls? Oh, well, you mean why didn’t AP do the poll before the vote in the Senate. Oh, well, we all know why. The AP wanted the vote to pass.
So now they’re out there trying to figure out, ‘Okay, how come we didn’t manage this well?’ We talked about this in the last hour. The Drive-By Media’s purpose is to ‘manage the news.’ Like every month (we told you about this in the last hour) we get the story: ‘Shock and surprise! Experts stunned! Job growth much higher than predicted!’ For six months this has been the case, be it the employment numbers or the economy in general. It’s a lot of being stunned. How do they have any ‘stunned’ left in them? Who are these experts they keep going to? If they’re constantly stunned and surprised, what kind of experts are they? Anyway, so what happens is, the Drive-Bys come out and do a poll, and they do a poll on the American people. Well, first of all, they spend 30 days of each month just ripping the economy to shreds and ripping Bush to shreds and ripping everything that’s going on good, trying to downplay it — Iraq, you name it — then they go out and take a poll, and the poll reflects what they’ve been reporting, and they say, ‘A-ha, we’re still able to manage the news,’ and that’s how it works. So Snerdley actually asked a good question. ‘Why didn’t they do this poll before the Senate voted on the immigration bill?’
They’re doing it now after the fact, but what they’ve learned is they didn’t ‘manage the news’ well during the Senate fight over immigration, because they were all for it. They were not telling anybody what was in the bill. They were trying to cast (right along with all the Democrats in the Senate and some Republicans) people like you and me who oppose the bill as a bunch of restrictionists, nativists, racists and bigots who hadn’t read the bill, just a bunch of ignoramuses — and it didn’t work. So now they’re out there trying to figure out, ‘What did we do wrong? How did we not manage this correctly?’ and they will try to learn from it. But even they say in their story here, ‘A low level of confidence in the government’s ability to handle an epidemic was spread more evenly through the population. But the bottom line is a low level of confidence in the government’s ability.’ I still tell you this is going to have some life to it. I still say that this whole immigration debacle was a brilliant example of the inefficiencies and the unworkability of big, bloated government — and also the unresponsiveness of it, or the near unresponsiveness of a big government, a central conservative tenet.
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RUSH: Larry in Penn Valley, California, you’re next on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hello, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: You’re doing a great job trying to wake us up, and I just hope more people will listen to you. I think I have another good reason to know what’s coming across our borders. Eight or nine years ago, a Russian colonel by the name of Lunev defected to our side. His front in this country was he worked for the TASS newspaper. He wrote a back. I don’t know if he mention the title of it.
RUSH: Sure, go ahead.
CALLER: It’s called ‘In the Eyes of Your Enemy,’ and he’s warning us that his job in this country was to find sites for the suitcase sized nuclear weapons, and he said that we better pay attention to this because as far he knows, they could be here. Now, we’re worrying about countries developing atomic weapons, but he said in Russia, 150 of these 88 pound weapons disappeared, and he testified before our Congress —
RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, just a second. Now, I was going to say something.
CALLER: Yes?
RUSH: The suitcase nuke is not a practical reality yet. I’m talking about something that an average looking person could carry around without suspicion, and something that weighs 88 pounds isn’t. I remember the story, and I know that a bunch of those things are missing, and there have even been novels that I’ve read written about those missing things.
CALLER: I have not heard any more about Colonel Lunev. I’m sure he has to stay in hiding.
RUSH: Well, no question about it.
CALLER: But I’ve never heard what the Congress decided, whether the man was legitimate or not. But it’s something to keep in mind when we have our borders so open.
RUSH: Well, you know, that former KGB spy could have been coming and planting all kinds of false stuff. It could go either way on that. But, look, your overall point is right. It goes back to border security, and there was a poll earlier today from the AP, interestingly, published the results of the poll after the Senate bill goes down to defeat, but the poll talks about how overwhelming, like 80%, 75% of the American people don’t trust the government to protect the border — either from bad people entering it or for an epidemic. They just don’t trust the ability of the government to protect us, domestically, right now, and it was more that than it was the amnesty provisions that caused people to have angst and opposition to the bill. But your example here of Lunev and his claim that 150 suitcase or quasi-suitcase-style nukes were missing from the old Soviet Union, just underscores the point. You have to ask yourself why in the world there was no border security. The border security discussion in this immigration bill was purely for show, and it was designed to convince us and buy us off, if you will. Yet nobody bought it because there hasn’t been any serious effort at border security since the ’86 bill.
What’s in this to make us believe something’s changed? It was clear that the effort on the part of these people in supported the bill was just get these people in here. Just legalize them and get them in here, for whatever reason. You know what it could have been, folks? It could have been something as silly as this. It could be that a bunch of American food companies have decided that America’s eating style are too healthful. We’re all being told, ‘Don’t go to fast food places. Don’t drink all that sugar stuff. Don’t do all that because it will kill you. You need to eat healthier.’ They’re trying to take all that stuff out of schools. It could have been something as silly as these companies lobbying Congress to let these new customers come in, who aren’t concerned with eating healthfully. Who knows? That’s a off-the-top-of-my-head example, but the bottom line is, they didn’t care about it. Why do they not? When they can see what’s happening in the UK, when they can see how porous borders around the world have led to all kinds of other problems, how in the world could they not see the vulnerability? Do they just think, ‘Ah, we’ll roll the dice. It probably isn’t going to happen. We’ve got systems to take care of it.’
None of it made any sense. It still doesn’t.