RUSH: You know, there been a lot of defections, two more defections, Judd Gregg — and who else? Domenici and Voinovich are defecting now on the war in Iraq. The New York Times is building up its case to get out of there. The White House, by the way, says, ‘There’s a story in the New York Times today that we’re planning on getting out of there. It’s not true.’ The White House is denying it today. Meanwhile, the Democrats in Congress are working up all of these investigations, challenging executive privilege, knowing the White House is going to assert it, and there’s a reason that all of this is happening. These committees in Congress from Leahy to Conyers to you name it in the House, they’re just trying to get Bush to repeatedly assert executive privilege. All their demands for his top aides, present and former, certain documents, they fall way outside the traditional requests for information, and they know it. It’s just pure harassment. They’re trying to shut down this administration for the remaining year and a half that it has left. Evidence of that, too, is that these committees are refusing to confirm or even hold hearings on scores of nominees to top administration positions, including the judiciary.
Now, what they’re trying to do here is not just a game. They’re not just trying to stall the presidency here for the next year and a half. They’re trying to destroy the executive’s power. They’re trying to destroy the office of the presidency and the ability of the president to function. Now, normally this is standard second-term fare. Delaying the confirmation of judicial appointments particularly, other nominations to cabinet posts, sub-cabinet posts, undersecretary posts, that’s standard fare. But this goes a little bit beyond standard fare because it’s far more systematic. There is a political calculation here that goes beyond tradition that’s guiding this, and what they’re trying to do is not just create one scandal; they’re trying to create multiple phony scandals as a pretext to tear the presidency down and paralyze it in every which way. Now, you might say, ‘Well, Rush, aren’t you going a little far here? If they’re trying to destroy or weaken the powers of the presidency, do they expect to lose the White House in ’08?’ No. Quite the contrary. When they get into office, they actually do abuse the powers of the presidency, from executive orders to pardons, and that will continue. They expect to win the White House, and they examine to win the Congress, and they expect to work systematically that way. So if the executive wants all kinds of power, the Democrats in the House and Senate, there can be in turf battles that might ensue, but this is all about growing the federal government in their image and limiting the administration here in the last 18 months to what it can do. If they take the presidency and they take the Congress, they’re going to work together to massively expand the power of the government, and they expect to do both — and our guys, ladies and gentlemen, are just surrendering. Our guys are not on the field.
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Back to this problem that’s in Washington right now. Congress is coming back to work today, and of course we’ve got all kinds of headlines out there. Congress Returns Ready to Battle Bush. Yeah! Screw those Islamofascists! We’re not going to battle our real enemies. We’re going to make up an enemy. We’re going to make the world’s enemy the president of the United States, and this is all about our political power. The real enemy is that damn Bush.’ Well, he’s not, but as far as they’re concerned, he is. So what are the Republicans doing? You might say, ‘Well, Rush, if the Democrats have designs on winning the White House,’ you should know they do and maintaining control of Congress, ‘what are the Republicans doing about it?’ Well, you tell me. It would be one thing if they just weren’t on the field, but it’s worse than that. They’re surrendering! From Voinovich to Judd Gregg, to Domenici, they’re surrendering. They are nowhere to be found on the war. They are nowhere to be found on permanent tax cuts, which is a singular Republican issue. They were nowhere to be found on it. They were nowhere to be found on judicial confirmations, and they had to have some sense beaten into them on illegal immigration or they would have destroyed the Republican Party altogether with that. So it’s not that they’re not just on the field. They’ve gone into surrender mode. I mean, look at this. Dick Lugar was the first the current wave of surrenders, then Domenici going soft.
These guys have been in the Senate forever. Voinovich has been in public office for over four decades. They’ve been there a long, long time. They are tired. They are weak. It looks like they’ve lost enthusiasm (certainly ideological enthusiasm), and all they’re trying to do here is hold on for another term. This is all about the next election, winning and putting finger in the air, moistening it and seeing which way the wind is blowing. But here’s the truth. The truth of this is that when it comes to what’s happening in Iraq, the American people could put up with the Iraq war for many more years. I don’t care what you’re hearing, there is not an uprising among the public. How do I know this? What did we just have? How many Live Earth concerts were there? Seven, that I counted. Now, in the good old days of the anti-war movement, a rock concert anywhere, under any auspices, ostensibly being televised around the world, would have been an ideal place to start raising hell about getting out of Iraq — and I’m sorry but it didn’t happen. You saw little pockmark examples of it, but anti-war movements, even at the concerts in this country, was not taken up and involved deeply with this, which tells me that the anti-war movement as it exists in this country remains a bunch of relics from the 1960s. In fact, I think Live Earth was such a disaster, it may spell the end of all of these live everythings: Live Aid, Live 8. This was indicative of a format and a technique that’s simply run its course.
But when you can’t even get a bunch of long-haired, maggot-infested, dope-smoking, blue-jean clad, tie-dyed wearing FM types out there taking advantage of this kind of an opportunity to preach against the war — when the big anti-war news of the weekend was Cindy Sheehan is going to run against Nancy Pelosi if she doesn’t offer articles of impeachment against President Bush in two weeks — I’m telling you, the American people are not experiencing a great uprising against the war. They may be ambivalent about it, and they may be in the midst of fatigue hearing about it because of the news, but let me ask you a question. In the four years what we have been in Iraq, can any of you name one thing any Democrat (throw Joe Lieberman out) or any Drive-By Media member has done or said that would help win the war in Iraq. You cannot. It may have happened, but it’s so infrequent that you don’t remember it. What have they done? It’s just the exact opposite. The Democrat Party has already proclaimed defeat. They own defeat. They have managed to demoralize the troops. They have openly criticized the commanders. The Drive-By Media dutifully report this. The Drive-By Media dutifully report all of the so-called acts of barbarism committed by our guys, but they ignore some truly unbelievable acts of barbarism that are taking place in Iraq today, and I’m going to give you some examples courtesy of a man over there who’s following our troops around. For all intents and purposes call him an embed. His name is Michael Yon, and let me just give you a heads-up.
Let me just give you a heads-up. Al-Qaeda throughout the country is attempting to persuade average Iraq to join their movement. ‘Persuade’ is a…loose terms, given what’s going on. They go to families that have young boys, ten years old, 11 years old. Um… I don’t know how to say this delicately, and I know that this is the lunch hour, but they invite the families to lunch. It’s lunch hour in the Eastern or Central Time Zones. They invite these families to lunch, at their homes and so forth — and when it’s time to serve lunch, they bring out the 11, ten-year-old sons of these families, baked with fruit in their mouths. There are pictures of this at Michael Yon’s website. Now, these acts of barbarism are being recently discovered. They’re not uncommon. This, as you know, is not ‘persuasion.’ This is coercion and fear and intimidation to get average Iraqis to join Al-Qaeda. But all you hear about in this country from the Drive-By Media is, Abu Ghraib and Club Gitmo and the Haditha incident where we supposedly raped and murdered innocent people. But you’re not hearing about this. It’s up to the White House and the president to make this news public. It’s shocking. We had to kill the Nazis because they were doing things like this. We had to kill them, folks to stop it. We had to stop them. You can’t just walk away from this on the pretext, ‘Well, it’s happening half a world away. It’s not going to happen here. We’ve been safe for seven years. Those people are barbarians anyway, and we can’t stop ’em.’ They’re aiming at us, folks, and they’re being honest in telling us what they want to do.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I realize, I fully realize, some of you may be bored with all this Iraq war stuff. I know that there’s burnout on it, and I know that there’s a feeling of fatalism that’s wafted over much of the country. Just two more things here that I want to mention to you and remind you that the surge report from General Petraeus is not due ’til September, and yet here it is July, and it’s DOA. ‘The surge is not working. It’s failed.’ The New York Times is running stories: ‘Bush White House considering new action to pull troops out! Defense Secretary Gates understands the futility of continuing in the war,’ blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if you read carefully places, you’ll find that that’s not the case. What’s the fear of September if we’ve lost anyway? We’re not going to pull all the troops out by September even if they’re right that it’s not working, so why not wait ’til September? Why not follow the plan? The only possibility is they fear that by September, the report will be that the surge is working. They can’t have that! They cannot politically have that for the Democrats and the Drive-By Media. Now, the defection of Lugar and Voinovich and a couple of others is being portrayed as the wheels coming off of Republican support of the war in Iraq, and of course they’re timing that with the reporting of this explosion in Iraq that killed upwards of 150 Iraqis in the news today. It’s on the front page of the New York Times, and (grumbling) ‘It’s the worst ever! More casualties thank (grumbling). It may be a final death blow to the president’s efforts,’ and so forth and so on.
The New York Times, I think, says that what would really make Bush withdraw and quit is if McCain returns from Baghdad and joins in with Voinovich and company and defects. Now, they may be hoping and praying McCain comes back and says, ‘It’s lost. It’s not working,’ and that Bush would then have no ally left and would have to quit. They may be hoping for that, but they then say if Bush can just stick it out without more defections until the September recess, then surrender can be averted. Why? If we’re going to surrender, we’re going to surrender. What’s magic about September? The Petraeus report, not just the congressional recess. Don’t forget this. Now, this big terrorist blast that killed 150 people was in the town of Amirli, which is a hundred miles north of Baghdad. You’ve never heard of this town. It had one small medical center that was overwhelmed with all of these casualties, understandably. So the Al-Qaeda gang basically hit the equivalent of Rio Linda because they can’t hit San Francisco, because the surge is having an effect. The surge is chasing them to all these other little towns from where they’ve been taking up camp. They’re having a tough time in Anbar province. All this, I gleaned from Drive-By Media reports but you’ve gotta dig deep to find it. Al-Qaeda is having a tough time in the Anbar province because the surge started killing Al-Qaeda and the Sunnis have taken up arms against them, as I mentioned at the beginning of the program, because they’re all getting fed up.
You’ve heard of Diala province being aflame a while ago. Al-Qaeda left Baghdad for Diala when we started the surge in Baghdad and now they’re having a hard time in Diala because the surge is there, as are some pretty hacked-off Iraqis who are also a little teed off as what’s happening. ‘Thirty-eight hundred volunteers have been recruited to fight with coalition forces…’ This is in the Boston Globe. As a member of the Turkmen community in parliament said in a New York Times piece on this story, ‘They have been suffocated out of Baghdad and Diala,’ meaning Al-Qaeda. That’s why Zawahiri sent his tape out on Friday. It’s not going great guns. It is treasonously irresponsible, it’s journalistic malpractice to get the news out of Iraq that we are getting, and then to have it ballyhooed and amplified with calls for defeat and the proclamation of defeat by a number of liberal Democrats — Pelosi and ‘Dingy’ Harry Reid. That Zawahiri tape from last week was a call to arms, and it was a justification of the Islamofascist state that they are trying to institute and make out of Iraq — and, by the way, that’s polling very poorly with the Iraqis. The Iraqis are not interested in Al-Qaeda becoming Afghanistan II, with guys like Mullah Omar and the Taliban running around. They just got through with something like that in Saddam Hussein. So I wanted to present to you the other side, folks, because you likely are not going to hear it anywhere else — including, sadly, the White House.
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RUSH: Terre Haute, Indiana, this is Rich. I’m glad you waited, sir. You’re next.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, mega dittos from Terre Haute.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Hey, you are always right.
RUSH: Well… Yes.
CALLER: You’ve been saying for months about the politicians that have been going on the interviews saying things about how what a mistake it was to go to Iraq and what a bumbler George Bush was. I’ve been punching up the new Iranian television station, Press TV, out of Tehran.
RUSH: You have been watching the new Iranian news channel? The Iranian government set up a new worldwide news network, like CNN —
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: — to counter the inaccuracies of the American Drive-By Media. It’s a stupid thing because the Drive-By Media here is one of the Iranians’ most important allies.
CALLER: Right. It looks like CNN’s Tehran studio.
RUSH: (Laughing.)
CALLER: Of course, in the last couple weeks they’ve had Reid, Pelosi, Murtha, Clinton, Obama, all of them, but this last week they’ve had Hagel, McCain, Domenici, and —
RUSH: Wait. Wait, wait, wait. You don’t mean that they appeared as guests.
CALLER: No, no, no, no, no.
RUSH: You’re talking that they did news stories with these guys ripping American policy in Iraq and Iran, right?
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Taken directly from American footage.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: And last night, I hadn’t seen this on the Drive-By Media, but I saw my senator, Richard Lugar, on Press TV, CNN Tehran, ripping George Bush and saying, ‘We gotta get the troops out.’
RUSH: (Laughing.)
CALLER: I’m outraged.
RUSH: Wait a minute. You didn’t know that Lugar paled out on this? This was a week ago or so.
CALLER: I know, but I don’t watch the Drive-By Media anymore.
RUSH: Oh, so you didn’t see CNN make the big deal about it?
CALLER: No.
RUSH: You knew he had fled the coop on Iraq. You just didn’t see any news coverage about it, right?
CALLER: I knew it, but I didn’t see any news coverage on it.
RUSH: But you saw it on Iranian news TV.
CALLER: I saw it on Iranian news TV.
RUSH: I have not seen it. I don’t think DirecTV yet is feeding that into (laughing).
CALLER: I’m pulling it off the Internet.
RUSH: Oh, you’re watching off the Internet.
CALLER: Yeah, the same way I get you because I don’t get local radio.
RUSH: Yeah? Why not?
CALLER: So I have to pull you off the Internet.
RUSH: Everybody is talking about video on the Internet and so forth, and I know it’s getting big, but it just doesn’t do it for me yet.
CALLER: Well, the thing is —
RUSH: It just doesn’t work for me. Part of it is hearing. I need it closed-captioned, and I don’t have my computer fed into a giant sound system because it doesn’t help.
CALLER: Well, the thing is that there’s the Drive-By Media, there’s the talk radio media, and now there’s the Internet media. Not only is there Tehran, this is Russia Today.
RUSH: Oh, I know it’s all over the place. I’m not denying it —
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: I know it’s out there. I hadn’t taken the time to even find the Iranian news network’s website. (laughing) The only question I have is, why go to the expense of setting up your own news network? Why not just import CNN and make it available in every home in Tehran, or throughout the country? Why? You wouldn’t have to do any editing. I appreciate the report, the on-site report out there, Rich.
RUSH: Debbie in Riverside, Alabama, glad you waited. You’re up next on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. To the man that runs the country, I am so happy to be speaking with you today.
RUSH: Thank you. It’s great to have you here.
CALLER: Thank you very much. I told your screener, I am so sick of listening to so-called Democrats lying to the American people every day, Rush, and I believe it’s time. It’s just time for everyone to demand that these people explain to the American people why they are socialists, why they are against freedom, democracy and capitalism.
RUSH: Well, yeah, except they won’t do it. That’s why I do it for you.
CALLER: You do, Rush, and I’m happy that you do. Why is it that we cannot get this on any other airwaves?
RUSH: You don’t expect the media to ask these guys questions like this, do you?
CALLER: You know, I’m expecting more from Fox and I’m not getting it. I’m very disappointed that they are not doing it, they are not pushing it. I don’t understand why they’re not.
RUSH: Well, you’ve just described an attitudinal existence and there’s no news network that would consider it news that Democrats are socialists. They’re not going to do it. Look, there’s some you gotta have realistic expectations out here, Debbie, and it isn’t going to happen. You’re not going to find any ‘news,’ quote, unquote, network asking Democrats, ‘Why are you opposed to freedom? Why are you socialists?’ Hell, forget that! The Republicans won’t even ask ’em. Republicans won’t ask. Harry Reid proclaims defeat in Iraq, and where’s the RNC? Where are the presidential candidates? What are they sitting around doing? The Republicans in the Senate? Where is anybody going to other Democrats in the Senate, ‘Do you agree with Harry Reid just said, that we’ve already lost, that the troops can’t do it, that the generals are incompetent?’ Nobody put them on the spot. The Republicans surrendered. You’re looking at the wrong people that do this. Republicans need to be challenging these people on their ideology and on their objectives and on their plans and on their methods of accomplishing, and then that makes news, and then you’d have somebody, Drive-Bys or elsewhere, then say, ‘What do you think about the charge here that Republican senator such-and-such says that you’re opposed to freedom and that you’re a socialist?’ Now, they’re not going to ever call them socialists, by the way! Republicans are not going to do that. You might find a few obscure House Republicans who might say it, but they’re not going to get covered. (interruption)
Who called them Stalinists? No. No. Nobody will call them Stalinists. I thought you told me somebody was calling them Stalinists. No! Nobody will ask them about their Stalinistic behavior, in terms of silencing dissent. Stalinism in this context is under the desire for the Fairness Doctrine, you know, shut up people that don’t agree with the state, intimidate people who say things that the state — in this case the Democrats — don’t want to hear. Make ’em retreat to their bathroom searching for hidden microphones before they whisper it to one another. That’s the objective. That’s a Stalinist tactic. That’s before you get to murdering the people who don’t listen to you after you give them orders. Stalin, Lenin, these guys were mass murderers. But I don’t mean it in that sense. I’m talking about just big statists. Manage your expectations out there, Deb. I know what you’re looking for. You’re looking for leadership that reflects what you think. You think it’s as obvious to you as it would be to anybody, and wonder why do they pussyfoot around it and so forth. They’re not going to do it. I don’t care if it’s Fox or CNN. The Iranians won’t even ask the Democrats this on their news network. It’s not going to happen.