RUSH: The American people could put up with Iraq for many more years. The thing that’s become patently obvious is that politicians have no stomach to see this through — now including more and more on the Republican side of the aisle — because they’re prisoners and paranoid of the media culture and the liberal culture that dominates inside the Beltway. Democrats have succeeded, as you well know, in portraying every aspect of victory in Iraq and subsequent progress as a series of defeats. The Republicans have never competently responded. Meanwhile, Sunni tribes are now killing Al-Qaeda terrorists. They’re getting fed up with them. There is no great civil war happening between threes three major factions — the Sunnis, the Shi’a, and the Kurds — despite the lie that there is a big civil war. Well, you can’t go back and wish we’d-a used more firepower at the outset because what’s done is done and what happened, happened. But I’ll tell you, they’ve successfully worked here to sabotage this war from day one. Nothing that they say, the Drive-Bys and the Democrats, can be believed. Nothing that they demand can be accepted. The problem is, I hope we’re not paralyzed in taking future military action that might in fact be required.
Now, let me give you details about this barbarism I described moments ago. The best way to do it is just read verbatim from Victor Davis Hanson. I’ve seen the pictures. I’ve been to Michael Yon’s website, and I’ve looked at the pictures of what he has found while accompanying US troops. Last Friday, Michael Yon ‘reported that al Qaeda served up a son for dinner to his own family — a barbarism reminiscent of Atreus (hence the ‘curse’ on the House of Atreus) cooking (sans feet and hands) and then serving his twin brother’s sons to their unsuspecting father Thyestes. So Yon reports a revolting modern-day Thysestean feast: ‘The official reported that on a couple of occasions in Baqubah, al Qaeda invited to lunch families they wanted to convert to their way of thinking. In each instance, the family had a boy, he said, who was about 11-years-old. As LT David Wallach interpreted the man’s words, I saw Wallach go blank and silent. He stopped interpreting for a moment. I asked Wallach, ‘What did he say?’ Wallach said that at these luncheons, the families were sat down to eat. And then their boy was brought in with his mouth stuffed. The boy had been baked. Al Qaeda served the boy to his family.’
‘What is striking about all this savagery — whether with the filmed beheadings of Westerners in Iraq to the recent flaming Johnny Storm human torch at Glasgow, screaming epithets as he sought to engulf bystanders and ignite his canisters — is the absolute silence of the West, either distracted by Paris [Hilton] and i-Phones or suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome and obsessed with Guantanamo. It is hard to recall an enemy so savage and yet one so largely ignored by rich affluent and distracted elites as the radical jihadists, as we have to evoke everything from mythology to comic books to find analogies to their extra-human viciousness. For a self-congratulatory culture issuing moral lectures on everything from global warming to the dangers of smoking, the silence of the West toward the primordial horror from Gaza to Anbar is, well, horrific in its own way as well…’ He could not be more correct, could not be. Look, I have said constantly on this program: We are so fat, dumb and happy; we are so affluent; we have so much opportunity in this country — look at the things that we’ve made up to tell ourselves we live in tough times, that we’re overcoming great obstacles — that we have big-time traumas that we have face, global warming, whether or not to eat organic food. You could go down a list of these meaningless, irrelevant things. ‘Is the food of the day going to kill you? Is your kid doing this or not doing this? Your kid may be playing dodgeball?
‘We can’t have that. That’s dangerous. They can’t play tag because somebody’s It, that means more people aren’t It, that’s embarrassing. You can’t do that. We can’t even have adequate testing in schools because it’s going to be unfair to those who don’t do well.’ We’re preoccupied with all of these irrelevancies that we have made into some of the most momentous, mountainous challenges we think we’ve ever had, when they’re nothing. We’ve tried to get people’s hands wringing over every little thing that happens in the news as a crisis except the one thing that really is, and that is a worldwide movement of lunatics who are being very open and honest about what their intentions are — and they are doing it and there are pictures of them doing it and they’re even committing these atrocities against westerners and journalists and so forth. Still, not a peep, except it’s our fault for causing it! ‘If we hadn’t gone there, if Bush hadn’t lied, if they hadn’t cooked the intelligence,’ all of these irrelevant things which themselves are not true. So what it’s led to is fatigue. You know, people only have so large an emotional reservoir. You can only hear about something for so long before you have to stop caring about it because you can’t care anymore, and the global warming people have, I think, jumped the shark on that, for a host of other reasons. It’s the same thing with the war in Iraq.
The American people have been pummeled for four years day in and day out about what an abject failure it was, how unjust it is, how unnecessary it was, how it has led to people actually hating America, ‘our image around the world is worse than it’s ever been,’ and, meanwhile, these acts of barbarism are going on, and they’re ignored, or they’re excused, or they are shuffled aside because it’s half a world away, and we don’t really expect this kind of thing to happen here. Well, ‘hope’ may be good for a couple minutes when you’re stuck at the bottom of a well but it isn’t going to get you out. This is something that troubles me greatly. I expect Democrats to be who they are. We know who they are. We know they’re cut-and-run. We know that they’re defeatists. We know that they are invested in the defeat of their own country and their own military for their own selfish political gains and purposes. But Republicans surrendering on this and running for the tall grass? That’s a disappointing thing. This is all going to be a factor in the next series of elections, presidential and congressional, coming up in November of 2008. We’ve dealt with people who commit atrocities in the past — as I mentioned in the first part of the program, with Nazis — and decided without much hesitation that they had to be killed. You couldn’t just say, ‘Well, leave ’em alone. If we don’t bother ’em, then they won’t bother us.’
But that seems to be the objective or the primary way that we make ourselves feel comfortable about how to deal with this. Here’s another headline. This is from the Financial Times: ‘Al-Qaeda Linked to Operations from Iran — Evidence that Iranian territory is being used as a base by Al-Qaeda to help in terrorist operations in Iraq and elsewhere is growing, say western officials.’ Okay, so Al-Qaeda is using Iran as a base for terrorists. The terrorists then go into Iraq; they kill Iraqis and Americans with the explicit intention of undermining progress in Iraq. They get help in doing that from the Drive-By Media in this country and the Democrats, then they flee back across the border to Iran. Any US progress in Iraq means that western culture and ideals are percolating in their backyard and they can’t have that — and, by the way, we talked about last week the latest tape from Ayman al-Zawahiri. That tape should have represented in a sane political environment the final nail in the coffin of this era of political Democrats, because it made clear that we are winning. It made clear that we are causing them all kinds of problems. The surge, in fact, is working in a number of places — and the New York Times inadvertently lets this cat out of the bag today, because the Al-Qaeda insurgents are being forced to take up shop in different parts of the country as we send surge troops in.
Yet here it is July, and we’re not going to have a report from Petraeus until September, and yet everybody wants to pronounce the surge DOA in July! It’s not September yet, when he’s due to report. Now, it’s July. Why? You can’t afford victory if you’re the Democrats! You can’t afford for something to actually be said to be working. Victory’s not good, not good politically. After all, we’ve already proclaimed defeat. The Democrats have already got us dead and buried and they’ve raised the white flag. It’s sickening. It’s extremely troubling that this kind of thing is being allowed to happen. Now, there’s a solution to it, and this is something talk radio can’t do. Talk radio is not going to be able to gin up the American people on this. Not totally. This is something the White House is going to have to make a cause of: bearing the news to the American people of these atrocities, talking about just who these people are, and just what it is we’re doing. You know, this would be so easy to refute. The Democrats are saying, ‘Well, yeah, all these Al-Qaeda are guys in Iraq, we admit that because Bush created them there. There weren’t any Al-Qaeda in Iraq.’ Okay, forget all of that and go back to the Zawahiri tape from last Friday.
They’re there in Iraq, and Zawahiri says, ‘It is the center. It is the forefront. It is where the mother of all battles is taking place.’ Why? If they didn’t care about Iraq before we were there, why do they care about it now? Why don’t they just stay hidden in the caves of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and, you know, build up their forces in Somalia? Why do they care about Iraq?’ Because we’re there! They can’t afford for a country in their region, particularly in an oil region, to go any way, shape, manner or form democrat, in terms of democracy and freedom, liberty. They just can’t allow that to happen. So, yeah, we’re there, and that might be the reason they’re sending everybody in, but the fact that they sent everybody and the fact that they do want Iraq, and that we know who they are, ought to wake everybody up as to just how serious this is. But too many people in this country say, ‘Let ’em have Iraq. Who cares?’ Because also, you know, we’re all concerned here about burning fossil fuels, folks. Yes, we might be destroying the environment! We might be polluting things, so we’ve got this movement on. Don’t use oil. We’re getting ourselves all wrung up about solar energy and wind farms and windmills, and it’s irrelevant. It’s stupid! It’s nothing but a bunch of liberalism to occupy people whose lives are fine, or have the opportunity to be fine. They want you in crisis constantly. They want you in misery and crisis constantly. They want you in that mode so that you will accept whatever ‘fixes’ they propose and so that you will also blame your president for the mood that they put you in.
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RUSH: Angie in Buford, North Carolina, welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hi, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: It’s a privilege to talk to you. I just have a brief comment about the Al-Qaeda who are murdering children and roasting them. I’m outraged by this, and I believe the entire country should be outraged, and I’m glad that people like you bring it to the forefront, but where’s the Drive-By Media? This should be an outrage.
RUSH: It’s not the action line. The action line is American atrocities. You have to look at it this way. The media has an agenda. Their agenda is to manage the news. Manage the news according to the outcome they desire. The outcome they desire is American defeat in Iraq and, of course, the president’s policy defeat.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: So anything that moves that forward is considered the action line. So if you got an Abu Ghraib, if you got a Club Gitmo, if you have Marines at Haditha, if you have atrocities, or if you have even 150 Iraqis blown up in a car bomb simply because the Americans are there, then that moves the action line forward. But Al-Qaeda atrocities do not move that action line forward.
CALLER: I do not understand that line of thinking on either the Democratic or the Republican part, because what these people are doing is representative of who they are internally, and it’s representative of a people that need to be taken down.
RUSH: Exactly.
CALLER: Of a people that need… Obviously we needed to go into Iraq and do something about these people, because they are of that mind-set. We didn’t create that in them. That’s like saying we shouldn’t go after serial killers we might make ’em mad.
RUSH: I know, but the action line again is that we did create them. The media and Democrat Party action line is that these people might have been running around doing a whole bunch of things, but they didn’t do it to us.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: But that of course ignores the existence of 9/11, which they are doing everything they can to pretend never happened, and create a 9/10 mind-set and a possibility of returning to it in the minds of the American people. By the way, one thing on that story from Michael Yon. I think I misspoke when I said that there are pictures of the atrocity I described. There are not pictures. There were pictures of all kinds of other atrocities. The atrocity I described was described to Michael Yon himself, and it’s not the first time he’s heard it. There aren’t any actual pictures of that, but we’re going to link to Yon’s website at RushLimbaugh.com, and you will see some pretty gruesome pictures of other types of atrocities that Al-Qaeda is committing, and these are atrocities designed to get people in line to intimidate them and get them to stop opposing Al-Qaeda because that’s starting to happen. The dirty little secret over there is that the surge is working, it’s driving these Al-Qaeda bands out of these places. First they were in Baghdad, then we drove ’em out to a different place, then the surge followed them there and we drove them out to a different place, and they continued to go to little towns and have incidents that kill 150 people, where there are very few medical facilities so it’s a very bad result, and so it’s reported:
‘Oh, my gosh, 150 dead! It’s the worst incident in one day in the Iraq war! Ooh, no, no, no!’ But don’t find out that this is being done on purpose to try to break the will of the American people and get the Drive-By Media to follow suit, as you can make book on the fact that they will, but you’re not hearing about all of the Sunnis that are taking up arms against Al-Qaeda because they’re not being as compliant as people would expect them to be. Anyway, your point about the atrocities is it simply doesn’t move the story forward. Do not forget this phrase: ‘Manage the news.’ That is what journalism is. Journalists are liberals for the most part, and they have an agenda, and they do have an interest in the outcome of events. They’re not dispassionate. They’re very engaged. They want you to believe they’re dispassionate, they don’t care how things turn out, but we know that’s not true. Every story, I don’t care if it’s a local, dogcatcher ran over a cat, there’s an action line to every story, and ‘government is horrible when Republicans run it’ is one action line. It’s beautiful and wondrous and Camelot when Democrats are in charge.
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