RUSH: We’re going to get to the Drive-By Media reaction to President Bush’s speech, both in print and in audio sound bites. Let me, before we go to the next break here, tell you who said what that the president quoted yesterday, particularly about Vietnam. The anti-war Senator in 1972, the president quoted in the speech yesterday, who asked, ‘What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos whether they have a military dictator or a socialist commissar?’ You remember that quote from a liberal Democrat? These are the people that tell us they care more than anybody else about the people, they love people, especially the oppressed and the downtrodden, the peasants. Subsistence farmers, these are the people Democrats have been saying all of my life that they care about and nobody else does, and here’s this guy ready to consign them to a lifetime of bondage. It was Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, one of the early segregationists, and the mentor to Bill Clinton. The following story about how it’s difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone from Vietnam, that New York Times writer was Sydney Schanberg.
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RUSH: Let’s take a look at some of the newspapers today and how they are covering President Bush’s speech — as I predicted, by the way, because I know these people, these commie libs and these Democrats. Well, I know them like every square inch of my glorious, stopped-shrinking naked body. Yeah, I kind of went off the diet. This next week on the vacation is going to be tough, too. But I’m going to do my best. I hate it. I’ve been off it for two weeks. Well, not off of it, but I haven’t been on it, and you can’t lose weight when you’re not on it. Anyway, some of these newspapers… The New York Times: ‘Historians Question Bush’s Reading of Lessons of Vietnam War for Iraq,’ but if you read the story — let me give you a quote from the story — ‘President Bush is right on the factual record according to historians.’ Well? I guess all Bush has is the facts! He didn’t debate causes. He’s dealing with facts on the ground, both in Vietnam and in Iraq. It’s these libs who are paranoid and upset here because it is they, ladies and gentlemen, who have been using this Iraq-Vietnam comparison, trying to create in people’s minds the idea of defeat. Remember, the Democrats own defeat. They are politically invested in it, and they’ve been trying to secure public opinion to go along with it. See, they’re not reflecting public opinion. The ’06 elections had nothing to do with Iraq. They just wanted to say they did. Now they’re trying to shape and form public opinion and they haven’t succeeded, and polls in connection with support of the surge continue to rise.
So you got all these Democrats and all these media people who have been making the Iraq-Vietnam comparison to dredge up all of this negative and doom and gloom in people’s minds. So Bush comes out and says, ‘Okay, you want a comparison? Here, try this,’ and just threw it right back, and has outmaneuvered them again, and they just can’t stand it. Remember, they see him as a barbecue jockey, hayseed, tin-of-chewing-tobacco-in-the-back-pocket, clearing-brush-down-in-Texas kind of guy. They see Rove and Cheney as the minds of George W. Bush. So, President Bush is right on the factual record. What more does he need if he’s got the facts on his side? UK Times. This is another one of these stories saying Bush is right, BUT, that ends with the newspaper saying we can’t leave a functioning Iraq behind us and we should quit. ‘His history lecture is disputable, not least in his elision of Vietnam and Cambodia. However, he is beyond controversy at the banal core of his main point: that Iraq has not yet come right but could in the future, although he skirted around the US’s almost complete lack of control over that course of events.’ Not so fast on Cambodia. He’s not wrong about Cambodia. Sit tight on this. In the Times story, they admit he’s right factually, but the Times says we gotta get out.
‘[T]he US’s goals may be out of its reach. To the extent that Bush’s rash comparison with Vietnam is justified, it undermines his case.’ Now, Peter Rodman, another Brookings Institution guy, writes today in National Review a piece called, ‘Returning to Cambodia, Killing Fields of Media Fallacies.’ Yesterday, some of the historians and some of the Democrats and the Drive-By Media in reacting to the president’s speech, said that Bush got it all wrong, that we destabilized Cambodia. Our presence there in the whole region destabilized the whole region, and he quoted the New York Times stories and some of the other statements made by others that the best days of Vietnam were ahead when we got out of there, blah, blah, and the same thing with Cambodia. These people, whenever we go anywhere where our national interests are at stake, we are accused of destabilizing the world, the reasonable that we go to by these libs. So Mr. Rodman says, no, sorry. It’s not the United States that destabilized Cambodia. North Vietnam did that by occupying parts of Cambodia and launching attacks. Let me read to you. ‘Trying to debunk the president’s VFW speech, the Times has lately resuscitated the hoary claim that it was U.S. military activity that destabilized Cambodia in the first place. This claim, alas, is not supportable. What destabilized Cambodia was North Vietnam’s occupation of chunks of Cambodian territory from 1965 onwards for use as military bases from which to launch attacks on U.S. and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam. … So the president has his history right. The outcome in Indochina was not foreordained. Congress had the last word, however, between 1973 and 1975.’
That’s what they de-funded the war. Maybe we should get clarification on this from John Kerry, when he served in Vietnam. He said he was in Cambodia at Christmastime. He was sent there. We found out that wasn’t true. Remember? It was ‘seared,’ seared in his mind that he had been there — and then we found out the only thing that was seared was his mind, and it has remained seared to this day. Of course I’m swiftboating him. Oh, speaking of swiftboating, have you heard what the Breck Girl said? The Breck Girl is out there saying the Lincoln Bedroom is not for rent, and, of course, a couple other things that are direct references to the Clinton years. But of course it’s not about the Clintons. No way. Why would anybody think a Democrat presidential candidate suggesting that the Lincoln Bedroom is not for rent would be talking about the Clintons? Of course, Mrs. Clinton is out there again. She’s being able to play the victim again because of this. It’s amazing how willing she is to play the victim. You feminazis out there, you better pay attention to this. This woman is all too eager to play the victim rather than the strong woman. At the same time, we are told that she’s a victim and she’s this victim of unfair attacks, and yet she’s stronger than any man and smarter than any man. Anyway, the New York Times: ”Free Iraq’ Is Within Reach, Bush Declares — President Bush delivered a rousing defense of his Iraq policy on Wednesday, telling a group of veterans that ‘a free Iraq’ is within reach and warning that if Americans succumb to ‘the allure of retreat,’ they will witness death and suffering of the sort not seen since the Vietnam War.’
This piece is by our old buddy Jim Rutenberg, by the way, and Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Mark Mazzetti. Boy, they put three reporters on this. (‘Damien Cave contributed from Baghdad, and Eric Schmitt from Washington’ as well.) This must have really agitated ’em. It’s Jim Rutenberg, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Mark Mazzetti. If they put three reporters on something, they’re really ticked off, and the whole point of this story is, not only did he bring up Vietnam, but he had the audacity to say the United States could still win! Doesn’t he know that’s not part of the narrative anymore? Doesn’t he know that’s not part of template? What do you mean, win? We can’t win! In fact, New York Times had an editorial saying even if there is a Holocaust or a genocide, we still need to get out of there. I think it might have been slightly in reference to the president’s remarks yesterday because the editorial was written before the remarks with the White House did put out text of the speech. ‘On Wednesday, as a second Democratic senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, called for Mr. Maliki to quit, he lashed out at American lawmakers who have questioned his competence. Mr. Bush — who on Tuesday confessed to ‘a certain level of frustration’ with the Iraqi government — responded by’ supporting Maliki.
So Hillary echoes Levin, so she’s getting some star coverage in this particular story. So… (sigh) What is this? Oh, the LA Times. If you people at the LA Times want to know why you are losing subscribers at a quick rate, this story is a good example. You think your readers are stupid — and admittedly some of the liberal readers are, the ones that believe everything that you pump at them just like the Times in New York subscribers do. ‘Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki warned the Bush administration after talks with longtime U.S. adversaries in Syria on Wednesday that Iraq ‘can find friends elsewhere’ if Washington doesn’t like how he runs his country.’ The Los Angeles Times in this story, rewrites history and tells their readers — and now I’m passing it on to you because I know some of you are smart enough not to buy it (it’s a business spent for us so we can deduct it) — is trying to tell their readers that al-Maliki was talking about Bush? He was talking about Carl Levin and now Hillary! Levin came out of Iraq earlier this week and said Maliki’s gotta go. It was that he was reacting to. They have to know this at the LA Times. The AP did the same thing. Well, of course! Once one does it, they all do it. They’re all in the same groupthink.
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RUSH: Starting in San Francisco today, Open Line Friday on Thursday, it’s Jeff. Nice to have you, sir.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. Thank you for taking my call.
RUSH: My pleasure.
CALLER: You know, listening to the Democrats now calling for the replacement of al-Maliki really reminds me of — or tells me that they want to recreate Vietnam. Anybody who reads history can — can go back and see that the Kennedy administration acquiesced in the — or gave a tacit approval to the — assassination and the replacement of the Diem regime, which was the only political force that was able to maintain a unified South Vietnam. And then after that there was a succession of US-installed puppet leaders, [South Vietnamese General] Big Minh is the one I can remember the most because he was in there about two or three times, and all through the Johnson administration they went on. And all through that, I mean I was in the military and I turned against the Vietnam War some years later because the Johnson administration had no intention of winning. They wanted a stalemate. They were drafting in men to go over there and get killed.
RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Explain to people why the Johnson administration had no intention of winning and wanted a stalemate with the draft.
CALLER: Well, they were (scoffs). You know they had this idea —
RUSH: Don’t just say it.
CALLER: — that China would intervene if they tried to win the war, disregarding the fact that China had one of the most massive earthquakes in history and had hundreds of thousands of people displaced and had their own problems.
RUSH: Well, the Chinese were already in there helping the North Vietnamese.
CALLER: Yeah, I realize that, but the fact that was according to what the Johnson administration people will tell you is that they were afraid that it would escalate into the Third World War, and anyone who was over there in the early stages understands that the United States could have won that war.
RUSH: Of course!
CALLER: In fact, the North Vietnamese said after Tet they were willing to negotiate terms of a ceasefire.
RUSH: Well, thanks to people like Walter Cronkite, Tet was portrayed as a giant defeat for us.
CALLER: Absolutely. And then, finally, when the Nixon administration came in with their plan, they got [Nguyen Cao] Ky, and I forget the other guy’s name, but the big military guys because they needed to run the military. They succeeded in Vietnamization. The South Vietnamese were defending their territory and they were basically at a military stalemate, until the Democrats withdrew all financial support from the South Vietnamese government, and that led to everything that we know happened afterwards.
RUSH: Right, which is what the president said.
CALLER: But what Democrats now are doing is trying to do exactly the same thing. They’re trying to get the United States to be put on the block with everybody over there in installing a puppet government, and then who knows what happens after that? These people are disgraceful.
RUSH: This is exactly what the president was talking about yesterday. The prime minister, president, whatever, of South Vietnam that he’s talking about, folks, is Nguyen Cao Ky. Remember that? It was mispronounced back then, ‘Nu-yun’ Cao Ky, but the Vietnamese pronunciation of it is ‘win.’ In fact, the Dallas Cowboys had one of their great interim middle linebackers was Dat Nguyen and it’s spelled the same way. He had to quit because of injury, but anyway, the Democrats back then — the Johnson administration were indeed — everybody was afraid of the Chinese getting involved. They already were involved! Once again, this is what you get with a defensive posture. ‘If we win, we might make somebody mad, and that we don’t want to do.’ Now, we’ll run the risk of making our own countrymen mad and we’ll sustain this thing and go along as a stalemate. Finally, the caller is right about this, too. The Democrats started demanding all these new leaders in South Vietnam, and we actually installed them. Iraq has no comparison, other than the way the Democrats are trying to portray it. They have a duly elected parliament and a president, and it’s up to them in Iraq now, who is their president, and who isn’t? So, Jeff, thanks for the call.