RUSH: Wendy from Lansing, Michigan. She was on the phone yesterday. We didn’t have a chance to get to her before time expired, so she graciously allowed us to call her back. We now have her phone number in our database.
CALLER: Well, hello, Rush, it’s an honor to speak with you, and I have to say you help me stay sane.
RUSH: Well, thanks, Wendy, I appreciate that.
CALLER: My comment is that yesterday, when you had Senator Kerry, you had a clip of him saying that because he met with people in Vietnam who had been through the reeducation camps —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — and they were doing well now. He implied that these camps weren’t so bad, but a temporary unpleasant experience.
RUSH: Yeah, they weren’t pretty, he said, but he’s met some people who came out of those things and they are thriving in Vietnam now.
CALLER: Well, I’d be curious to see what Senator McCain’s response was to this and other POWs who were at POW camps at the hands of communists in Vietnam, and, you know, to me, his statement implies that anyone who was, you know, in a POW camp or reeducation camp at the hands of the communists in Vietnam, they didn’t have such a bad time because they’re doing well now.
RUSH: Yes, yes, yes. But I don’t think anybody — you mentioned Senator McCain and others. I think Senator Kerry is so passé now that nobody but me and some of my brethren waste time responding to the things he says.
CALLER: Well, I just think Kerry needs to be wiser about what he says, and I would think there are some POWs and other people — we have people here in this country who came over from Vietnam and have survived and they’ve got horrible stories. I’ve heard some of them, and some of the things that are still going now like they sell their children over the Internet.
RUSH: Wendy, you gotta remember the context of this. The Kerry sound bite that you heard occurred last July and was not within the context of the firestorm of opposition and anger directed at President Bush yesterday for bringing up the comparison between Vietnam and Iraq. It was only because this is the finest radio program on earth with the greatest set of archives of past programs that we were able to go back and get that from July and make it relevant. If you didn’t hear the date that I had mentioned, it aired yesterday, that’s one of the reasons that people you’re asking about didn’t respond, because this was back in July when the only people in town were people like Kerry, and it was on C-SPAN one morning and so forth. It was part of a one-hour appearance. But that’s why this show is what this show is. In fact, we can go back to the archives even from yesterday and dig the bite out almost instantaneously, so if you weren’t here yesterday — tsk-tsk — but nevertheless here’s what Wendy from Lansing was talking about.
KERRY: Let me just say, to the first part of your question with respect to boat people and killing, everybody predicted a massive bloodbath in Vietnam. There was not a massive bloodbath in Vietnam. There were reeducation camps, and they weren’t pretty, and nobody likes that kind of outcome, but on the other hand, I’ve met a lot of people today who were in those education camps who are thriving in the Vietnam of today.
RUSH: He’s probably only sorry that the reeducation camps failed. How could they be thriving? Anyway, that’s what Wendy was talking about. It makes me angry every time I hear it, no bloodbath, 50,000 American deaths in Vietnam, not a bloodbath. These guys don’t think Rwanda wasn’t a bloodbath, Soviet Union, China, weren’t bloodbaths. ‘People misunderstand what the communists had to do, Mr. Limbaugh. You obviously see a commie behind every rock. You and McCarthy, same mold, you just don’t have the sophistication to understand the way we liberals look at the world.’ All I know is that a number of Americans have lost their lives fighting communism since before I was born, and we finally beat them with no help from people like Kerry. In fact, Kerry and his crowd favored policies called appeasement and mutual coexistence with these people, and they looked admiringly at certain aspects of Soviet life and so forth.
It is stunning to me how they ignore history. Like I said yesterday, too, I’ve gotta repeat this because this is one of the great ironies, and I can’t remember the guy who wrote the book, [Jim Piereson – Camelot and the Cultural Revolution] but it was a big book. It talks about the rise of modern liberalism, and he traces it to the assassination of JFK. Who killed Kennedy, folks? It was communists. I don’t care whether Oswald was working for the Cubans, whether he was working for the Russians, it was a communist. You just can’t have that, communists, why, communists killed Camelot, our president — and after that happened is when the liberals began to become soft on communism. They were not before Kennedy was killed. Kennedy was not soft on communism. But they became appeasers and soft on communism and started looking everywhere else around the world for our enemies and found most of them within their own country.