RUSH: General Peter Pace — and this is from TIME Magazine, ‘In his most optimistic remarks since the U.S. troop buildup began, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday that Iraq has undergone a ‘sea change’ in security in recent months, and that this will influence his recommendation to President Bush on how long to continue the current strategy. After conferring with Maj. Gen. Walter Gaskin and other commanders in this provincial capital west of Baghdad, Pace told reporters he has gathered a positive picture of the security environment not only here but also in Baghdad, where he began his Iraq visit on Monday.’
This is an amazing story. This kind of optimism is rare. They’re being very, very careful about distorting or exaggerating this. And so, as I said yesterday, we had a story from Major General Rick Lynch who commands the 3rd I.D. yesterday in the New York Times — I’d much rather listen to him, and I’d much rather listen to General Pace and believe what they say — they are there — than to listen to Jim Webb or Harry Reid or any of these other Democrats who are trying to secure defeat. Senate Democrats said yesterday they would keep the Senate in session through the night tonight in an effort to highlight Republican resistance to allowing a simple majority vote on a plan to withdraw troops from Iraq. It’s going to be an all-night session. Nothing will be accomplished, ladies and gentlemen, to go with eight months of Democrat Congress where nothing has been accomplished other than the minimum wage.
The Senate Democrats are all upset that the Iraqi parliament’s taking a summer recess. We’re in the middle of a war. How can they do this? We’re in the middle of a war. And here we’ve got stunts and nothing being done by our own legislature, our own Congress, nothing but stunts, nothing but investigations, nothing but harassment, nothing of substance, and they have been on vacation all summer. The only difference is I love it when they go on vacation. When they go on vacation, nothing gets done, and one of the best things that can happen to the country is when they’re in session or when there is gridlock. This is a taxpayer funded publicity stunt that’s going to happen tonight. If you look, there’s a big story in The Politico about how this thing all came about, and it’s very clear that the Democrats are now so completely beholden to the appeasement left, these kooks on the Internet, that they’re putting on this show for them. They’re putting on this show for the MoveOn.orgs and for the other things like that, and those organizations are actually running this. Schumer is talking to them, Reid’s talking, like they care what these people say and think, and these people are actually yanking the chains of the Democrats who are making this happen.
The enemy is going to be watching this as well, by the way. It’s going to be on television. The enemy will be watching it as well. It is a complete farce. There is nothing they can do to end this war, short of cutting off funding. And they don’t have the votes to cut off funding. They don’t have the votes to cut off funding because the American people don’t want the war ended in this way. In fact, Rasmussen has a poll out now, just came out this morning, 51% of the American people say let the thing go through September. There’s no reason to stop it here in July. Let the surge go as it was intended and wait for the reports in September. The Democrats, of course, will ignore this poll. They don’t have the votes to cut off funding because they don’t have the support of the American people to cut off funding. If the American people were really as opposed to all this as the Democrats say they are, it would be easy to cut off funding. This whole thing tonight should be bought and paid for, funded by the Democrat National Committee.
But the good news is this. The American people are going to look at this, the Democrat Congress’ poll numbers are going to plummet even further. Well, I say they’re going to look at this. They might. Because there’s nothing but reruns on television. I’m going to urge people to just take a peek at this tonight, not watch the whole thing, record it. TiVo it, DVR it, VCR it, whatever, and save this and show your kids and your grandkids what a worthless bunch of Democrats we had in the United States Senate in the year and summer of 2007. Take a sneak peek at it. It will be on C-SPAN2. What else you got to do? It’s going to be going all night. When you get up to go to the bathroom, click on the TV, and as you walk to the bathroom — in fact, put a TV in the bathroom. When you’re in the bathroom, watch what’s going on because the difference in your toilet and on the floor of the Senate will not be recognizable.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: National Intelligence Estimate was released this morning. Frances Townsend had a big press conference. I’m watching it and it was fascinating. It is fascinating to contrast this NIE with previous NIEs. The last time that they released a National Intelligence Estimate, it talked about all kinds of horrible things that were lurking out there, and the Drive-Bys ate it up, and the Democrats pounced on it. They ate it up and said, ‘Bush is failing. This is not working. We’re going about this the wrong way.’ We’ve got an NIE out there today that is being totally ignored by the Drive-By Media because it attests to the ongoing abilities of Al-Qaeda, that they are now even in Iran. Al-Qaeda has leadership in Iran, and they are staging operations out of Iran into Iraq. It also states that Iraq is now the full-fledged headquarters of Al-Qaeda, even though they are mounting and building up strength once again in Pakistan. In fact, let’s go to sound bites two and three here, just to give you NBC’s flavor of this. This was also on the Today Show today. Meredith Vieira talked with Andrea Mitchell, and she said, ‘Andrea, what’s new in this report?’
MITCHELL: What is new is that the report will say that the Al-Qaeda threat will be persistent and evolving over the next three years and that Al-Qaeda and its imitators will continue to try to attack the US homeland. In particular, Meredith, the report says Al-Qaeda is franchising its operations and is as active as at any time since 9/11. But contrary to erroneous leaks last week, the report does not say that Al-Qaeda is more of a threat now than it was before the attacks on 9/11.
RUSH: Next question. ‘Well, we’ve spent billions of dollars, obviously, on homeland security. Has it been for nothing based on this report, has it done anything to keep Al-Qaeda outta here?’
MITCHELL: In fact, Meredith, this report will say that the nation is safer now, that worldwide efforts since 9/11 have indeed prevented attacks on the homeland and made the terror group realize that it is harder to attack the United States than it was before 9/11.
RUSH: There is conflicting news in this for the Drive-Bys and the Democrat Party, because any report — and, by the way, the NIE is something that the Democrats love. Remember the NIE is an association of intelligence agencies, an independent group, that get together and come up with this report, and the Democrats have always relied on it for credibility, and they have highly touted it. The Democrats are in a position now of trying to convince this country that we don’t face a threat, and the only threat that we really face is George W. Bush not getting out of Iraq. And if George Bush won’t get out of Iraq, then we’re going to have more and more terrorists that hate us. We had no terrorists that hated us before Iraq. It’s all Bush’s fault. Now here comes the NIE talking about how dangerous Al-Qaeda is and how big they have rebuilt and so forth, while the Democrats are in the midst of trying to say there’s nothing to be at war here about. Edwards is saying, ‘It’s a bumper sticker slogan.’ The Democrats are trying to convince as many people as possible that we are not at war, that we don’t face enemies, that these hostilities are strictly related to the hatred the world has for George W. Bush.
Then on the other hand, other parts of the report say, it’s harder for them to attack here. We know it is because they haven’t. It’s been six years and they haven’t hit us. No doubt that they’ve tried. No information on how many times they’ve been stopped and shut down. Can’t ever broadcast and make public your success stories on things like that. But it hasn’t happened. So what’s been done right — this is a pretty favorable report — and that’s why you’re not seeing a lot of interviews on TV right now. You’re not seeing a lot of analysis on this. You’re not seeing a lot of hand-wringing and the usual reaction had the news in this thing been something that Democrats could use. I’m telling you, they’re in the process here of doing it again, like they did in 2002, the Wellstone memorial, doing it again. They’re walking into a door, but they haven’t opened it first. They’re opening the door, and it’s hitting them right in the face. It’s bloodying up their noses, in the middle of all of this, the success in the surge. Now we’ve had two members of the military, one, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, attest to it in his most optimistic report since the surge began and probably in a couple years in Iraq. On the security side, we have another general that said that yesterday in the New York Times.
The Democrats are in the process of trying to lose the war, at the time this is working. They’re trying to do everything they can to shackle the president and the Republicans with this defeat. It is a pure political move, and it’s what they’re doing. It’s going to backfire like everything else that they have done. The American people are going to see this for what it is, folks. It’s a game that the Democrats are playing, politics and everything else, with this war and the lives of those who are fighting it. It’s going to backfire on them, as has everything else that they have done. They’re so obsessed with pleasing these left-wing loons, they are turning off the general public. Why do you think that congressional approval numbers are as low as they are? If the American people believed as the Democrats believe they do on Iraq, the numbers of approval would be skyrocketing. Don’t think that the American people are upset because they didn’t get the immigration bill done; and don’t think they’re upset because they haven’t built a new dam someplace; or don’t think the American people are upset because they haven’t passed legislation.
The American people do not look at Washington and measure success by the numbers of pieces of legislation they get passed up there. They look and they see how these people behave on television and what they say, and the Democrats are front and center on camera. You can’t find a Republican there, unless they’re a moderate Republican who are operating totally out of fear right now. This is a do-nothing-good Congress, and they’re making it official every day. These senators are going to talk and talk and talk tonight. Despite all the talk, despite the all-night session, you will not hear a single detailed, workable strategy by the Democrats or some of the Republican-in-name-onlys up there for winning the war on terrorism or even fighting it. You will not hear anything optimistic. You will not hear about American exceptionalism. You will not hear anything that gives the troops a morale boost. You’ll hear nothing of the sort, and it’s typical of what they’ve been doing, and it’s going to come back and bite ’em once again. You watch.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I was serious when I said earlier I want to encourage each of you to record the Senate’s all-night session, just so you can have it for your kids and grandkids so they can one day know, ladies and gentlemen, which senators are responsible for the genocide that will ensue in Iraq if Harry Reid and his party wins the day. Just so they will know which senators surrendered and refused to back the troops in the field, just so they can know which senators freed Al-Qaeda from the battlefield so they could slaughter Americans here at home, just so they can know which senators didn’t have the will to win the battle of Iraq and forced us to go back to the region to finish the job some other time when your kids and grandkids grow up, costing us far more lives. I want future generations to know which of these politicians deserves to be condemned for eternity because the Drive-By Media is not going to report it that way. The Drive-By Media is all excited about this because once again Bush is being savaged. The Democrats are sending marching orders out to themselves, little memos. This whole thing tonight is, ‘Attack Bush! Attack Bush! Attack Bush!’ and that’s what this is. That’s why this is nothing more than a television commercial disguised as Senate debate.
The DNC ought to be paying for it and you ought to take a moment to look at some of it so that you know what actually happened. The bottom line is this. Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and the Democrats want to hang Bush and the Republicans with a loss in Iraq, because they see that as their ticket to the White House and a congressional majority for their own version of eternity. They’re going to use this. If they could ever secure this defeat before Bush leaves the White House, they will use it to label the Republicans incompetent on national security. Every negative consequence of a loss in Iraq will be said to have been the result of Republican war mismanagement. The Democrats will say, ‘We had to get us out! It was going so bad, we had to get our country out of that. We knew we were going to have to fight these people another day, but we have a smarter way to do it. This administration and Republicans are horrible at national security’ they’re horrible at using the military.’ This is what they want to set up. They think that they can insulate themselves from being weak on defense by imposing a loss on Bush and by blaming the loss on Bush, and blaming every single subsequent attack on Bush and Republican failures and mistakes. Make no mistake. If Al-Qaeda does hit before we get out of Iraq — any time they hit, it doesn’t matter when.
If we get another attack in this country, ‘Bush did it! It’s Bush’s fault, mismanagement, caused by being in Iraq. We Democrats tried to warn you,’ blah, blah, blah, they will politicize even that. Ah, they might come together for a day and lament the loss and share the soar and so — wouldn’t be able to help themselves, it would be less than a week before they would be out there blaming Bush and Iraq for this. This is their long-term strategy, folks. They twist everything with the help of their allies in the Drive-By Media. They twist everything so that they are seen as strong and competent on national security while Bush and the Republicans blundered, and they do this because they know that that’s the exact opposite of the truth. They are the ones weak on national security. They are the ones incompetent. They are the ones that are seen as uninterested in it. They are the ones seen as trying to secure defeat. I don’t think they get it. I think their ego and their arrogance is such that when they go on TV and speak, because of all these years of having a media monopoly in their side, they think that their words are accepted as gospel. I don’t think they learned much from the immigration debate.
All they learned from that was, ‘We gotta keep secrets from the American people,’ and they resent you. You’re not supposed to be able to do what you did in shaping the outcome of that particular piece of legislation. So they think that you’re not smart enough to see that they are the ones that are securing defeat. They don’t think you’re smart enough to understand that they are the ones who are trying to engineer a humiliating defeat for the United States for the simple purpose of pinning the loss on Bush. I’ve long been saying this, and I’ve been saying it since as a theory, but it much more acutely now. It is crystal clear to me what these people are doing. It’s also crystal clear to me that they’re tone deaf. It is crystal clear to me that their arrogance and condescension is such that it prevents them from seeing the mistake that they’re making. Here we are in the middle of the surge. It’s working. The boots on the ground everybody is talking about, are working. The Democrats are not the disputing these reports, by the way, from General Pace; yesterday the New York Times, Major General Rick Lynch. The Democrats — well, they might tonight. It will be interesting to see. But so far they haven’t disputed any of this.
They just ignoring it, and they’re trying to create false news with the help of their buddies in the Drive-By Media. ‘It’s all falling apart. It’s so bad, we can’t wait. We have to get out now!’ What I want you to know is, the only reason we have to get out now is because if it’s working — and this, by the way, the NIE and these two statements from the two military guys in the past two days? They were the worst news the Democrats could have heard. That’s why they’re doing this all-nighter tonight. That’s why here hoping it gets covered the way they want it covered: ‘Bash Bush! Blame Bush! Try to overwhelm the report of the surge being successful with another all-nighter of drum beating, doom and gloom, negative Bush-bashing,’ knowing full-well the Drive-Bys are going to amplify it and cover it. Here’s the point. Iraq will be a Bush and Republican loss — even though the Democrats will have forced it — if they succeed somewhere down the road the next year and a half. They’re peeling off these Republican moderates. I’ll get a little story on that as the program unfolds today. So far, they don’t have the votes to cut off funding, and I don’t think that they would ever do it if they did have the votes.
It wouldn’t be veto proof. But this defeat, this theoretical defeat that they’re seeking, and all the horror that will flow from it will be laid at the Republicans’ feet. I’m telling you what this is. This is about one thing. It’s about building a Democrat political agenda for the next 25 years. They’re not going to lose the House again like they did in ’94. They’re not going to go through 14 years in the wilderness! That’s not going to happen — and they’re not going to lose the Senate. It’s not going to happen! So they’re setting all this up. They gave it a shot with immigration. That was the Comprehensive Destroy the Republican Party Act of 2007. We staved it off, but these people are relentless. Their weakest point has been national security. They intent to manipulate the war effort to, in their minds, ‘fix’ that. So, while embracing surrender and the anti-war movement and undermining the war, they expect to come out of this as the national security party — and they can only do that with the help of the Drive-By Media and securing a loss. But I don’t even think they can pull that off. I don’t think there is any way that they can be seen as strong as national security, given the rhetoric and the votes and the way they have behaved in the first six and a half months of this Congress.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Steve in Fort Wayne, Indiana, we start with you on the phones. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Rush, it’s a great pleasure to speak to you. I’m a retired Navy chief petty officer, and I would like to thank you for all you do for the folks in uniform.
RUSH: Thank you, sir. It’s reciprocated, that thanks.
CALLER: I think your comment about recording the all-night love-fest tonight is a great idea. I think we need to record for posterity everything that the Democrats say in the next year to use for, basically, information for the ’08 election cycle.
RUSH: Not only that, but we record a lot of this stuff, obviously, for use in our audio sound bites, and we have a tremendous archive of this stuff, and we go back to the archives and we play it. The best thing you can do when you’re trying to describe people to other people is use those people. Use their voice. ‘Here is what Daschle said. Here is what Ted Kennedy said. Here’s what Harry Reid said,’ and then you play it. I think people ought to tune in. I do think they ought to watch this, especially since the Democrats are so eager for everybody to watch it. I want to make a prediction, though (because these people are smart; they’re sly). At the opening of this thing tonight, whenever it is or at some point in primetime when they think the viewership will be at its peak, you’re going to get a riff from these Democrats on how great our soldiers are and what a great job they’ve been doing, how impossible it has been given the incompetence of the commander-in-chief. But they’re going to try to take a swipe at this notion that they don’t support the troops, and you’re going to get sick listening to the hypocrisy of these people who, before tonight, have done nothing to raise the morale. In fact, they’ve done everything they can to destroy it. But you will hear that tonight. They’ll try to tackle some of these things, while professing their support for the troops, ‘and that’s why we want to get them out. We want our troops to be safe. That’s why we want to pull ’em out. They’re in a meeting with unjust war. It’s being mismanaged by Bush and Republicans,’ blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They won’t be able to do that for long. They will revert to who they are and you will get your daily dose of doom and gloom, defeatism and pessimism from it.