RUSH: I am beside myself. What I just predicted 20 minutes ago just happened, and if I were sitting on that committee today, I would stand up when it was my turn and I would lambaste and I would lash out and then I’d have to resign for violating House rules. Tom Lantos, who is co-chairing the committee today (he’s from California) has just told Petraeus (I’m going to have to paraphrase this) that he knows — he, Lantos, and all Congress knows — that Petraeus and Crocker have been sent up there today to convince the Congress and the American people that victory is at hand. Lantos says, ‘I don’t buy it.’ Who the hell is Tom Lantos? This is before the Petraeus report has been made public. He has just told General Petraeus: We’re not going to believe a damn word you say here, General. He did say, by the way, ‘nothing personal.’ We know it’s the Bush administration. I’m paraphrasing here. We know you’ve been sent up here to lie. It’s what he said! You’ve been sent up here to try to convince us that victory is at hand. ‘I don’t buy it,’ said Congressman Lantos, and I will guarantee you when this is all over today, you know where the media is going to go? They’ll go to Lantos. ‘It was like a very courageous thing you said to General Petraeus. What’s your thought on this?’ He’ll repeat it and they’ll marvel and they’ll go to Petraeus, ‘What do you think about what Lantos said?’ They won’t ask Petraeus about what he said. If they do, it will be under the auspices of, ‘Is this really what you think, or is this what Bush told you to say?’ Here’s Danny in Farmington, Minnesota. Hi, Dan. Welcome to the EIB Network.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: I appreciate it. I’m going to start off by saying that my son is a Purple Heart recipient, and he received the Purple Heart on his first tour. And he’s on his third tour in Iraq right now. He’s a scout sniper, a Marine scout sniper, and I don’t know what else to say except I just… I’ve had it. I’ve completely had it!
RUSH: Let me tell you something. I know how you feel, believe me. I know exactly how you feel. I don’t know that you’re as angry as I am. You ought to be.
CALLER: Oh, Rush.
RUSH: I bet you’re angry.
CALLER: Oh, Rush, let me tell you, I just don’t… You know, I just wish I had a radio talk show like you so I could be able to tell you — and thank you for telling for me, because if you wouldn’t have said it for me, I probably would have gone crazy a long time ago.
RUSH: Thank you. I’m going to make you even madder. You ever wonder, when you watch a guy like Lantos — or when you hear me say what he just said, which is in consort with all the other Democrats — do you wonder why?
CALLER: Well, Rush, I’m pretty much completely convinced that they would sell their souls to the Devil for political gain.
RUSH: Exactly right. This is a pure political calculation. But I want to tell you what it really it means. It means that to the people like Tom Lantos — despite what he said in the opening remarks here — the votes of people like you are irrelevant, because there are only two million of you, and they don’t care about military families. They feel like they can throw you under the bus you, and every one of you, can vote against them and they can still win.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Rush Limbaugh, doing, not a slow burn today, but a rather actively rapid burn, as I note what I’m watching on television regarding the Petraeus and Crocker presentation of their report — as required by Congress, by the way. These two gentlemen have been sitting there for 36 minutes and 20 seconds. They haven’t said a word. The pontification that started it all with Tom Lantos from California has been followed by a rebuttal by Duncan Hunter, and now Ileana Ros-Lehtinen from Florida is getting into the act, and it’s amazing to see a four-star general in full-dress uniform — duty, honor, country; we know the oath that the military take — a man unanimously confirmed by the Senate for his current position, it is just stunning to sit there and watch a Democrat congressman from California essentially tell him that we’re not going to believe a word you’re going to say to us when you start speaking. The man’s wearing his four stars in full military dress uniform, a man who prior to this day has been touted as the best for this job this country has, and Tom Lantos essentially said to him: You’re going to come up here and you’re going to lie to us because you’re being told to by President Bush. You’re going to tell us that there’s progress.
Tom Lantos said, ‘I don’t buy it.’ Lantos then went on to tell General Petraeus that this position of his that maybe we can get rid of a brigade, which is like 4,000 troops, by the end of this year, the first of next year, is meaningless and doesn’t get anywhere near what Congress wants or what the American people want. This morning, ladies and gentlemen, as I was delving deep into my show prep, I kept running across Drive-By stories. An unnamed Democrat senator in one of these stories said, ‘No, no, no, we are not going to come out and call General Petraeus a liar. We have our surrogate support groups to do that.’ Those surrogate support groups would be MoveOn.org, Media Matters for America — a Clinton front group bought and paid for by her money — George Soros, and any number of these other left-wing, anti-American, anti-war activists. But I guess Lantos didn’t get the memo, or else they just can’t control themselves. Here, we have Lantos. We have 20 seconds of what he said, and this is the essence of it.
LANTOS: The fact remains, gentlemen, that the administration has sent you here today to convince the members of these two committees and the Congress that victory is at hand. With all due respect to you, I must say: I don’t buy it.
I am hoping — and I will admit this even to those of you on the left who don’t like God. (There is no separation of church and state, by the way, on this show, this show being the state for its three hours.) I am praying that Petraeus ends up running rings around these arrogant, condescending snobs. These Democrats have descended further than even I, El Rushbo, considered possible. They are nothing more than national disgraces. It is just startling to watch this. I can’t describe for you the depth of rage, emotion, anger, frustration, all of those things, that I feel when I see a four-star general in full military dress being told he’s a liar, being told that he is a puppet, being told that nothing he says is going to be considered truthful — and he sits there, and he doesn’t flinch. He stares right back at them. I just laugh when a decorated, four-star general in full military dress, unanimously confirmed by the US Senate — and I think last time I looked, as Duncan Hunter said, unanimous is pretty close to a majority in the Senate. I look at him just not flinching, and I look at Lantos telling him that his strategy of withdrawing a brigade is nothing, and I want to ask myself, ‘Where is the military expertise of Tom Lantos? Who is advising him? Has he been there? How long ago?’ I don’t know, but I can tell you that the Democrats’ message on this is all over the board. Three weeks ago, you had Jim Clyburn of the Congressional Black Caucus who said, ‘You know, if this report is good, it presents problems for us,’ meaning the Democrat Party.
You had Durbin and a number of others, and House Democrats who have gone over to Iraq and said: this surge is really working. Anbar province — six months ago Democrats were using that as evidence that the war in Iraq had failed and was already lost — is now safe. I want to repeat a point that I made in the previous hour of today’s stirring and memorable program, ladies and gentlemen, and it’s this. You remember all during the past month the experts told us that we can expect a Tet-type offensive, just like happened in Vietnam, that the Al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq, knowing full well this report was coming out, would start launching attack after attack after attack, nothing but bombs, blood and guts, and burning cars and personnel carriers on the news for three straight weeks — and then something funny happened on the way to the Petraeus report. The Al-Qaeda Tet Offensive never happened, and we would have to suggest, ladies and gentlemen, that of all weeks for such an offensive to occur, it would have been last week on the eve of this report, but it didn’t happen! Why? Could it be that they are much weaker than we have even been made to believe? In my estimation, there’s no question about it. There’s no Tet Offensive. Yet the Democrats, despite the fact that they said they were going to let their surrogate groups call Petraeus a liar, opened today with Tom Lantos essentially doing it. I want you to hear this again. Tom Lantos in his opening remarks before the Petraeus testimony — which, 45 minutes into it, still has yet to begin.
LANTOS: The fact remains, gentlemen, that the administration has sent you here today to convince the members of these two committees and the Congress that victory is at hand. With all due respect to you, I must say: I don’t buy it.
RUSH: We’ll be back after this.
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RUSH: I just remembered who Tom Lantos’s military advisor is. It would be Bashar al-Assad. The last time he went on a foreign trip it was with Nancy Pelosi to Syria. Remember that trip? By the way, here’s Duncan Hunter. I mentioned to you that he had responded to Tom Lantos. This is how he did it.
HUNTER: The last week or so has been spent attacking your credibility with major attacks here in the United States, and some of them emanating from right here, saying essentially that your testimony is going to be — and I quote my friend from California, Mr. Lantos, ‘Not your testimony, but testimony which is written by, ‘political operatives.” In fact, I know that’s not the case. I haven’t reviewed your testimony, but I know this: duty, honor, country. Those are the principles by which our great officers in the United States Army and the other services derive their careers and base their careers on. It’s an outrage that we spent the last week prepping the ground, bashing the credibility of a general officer whose trademark is integrity, who was unanimously supported by the US Senate.
RUSH: So there was response to Tom Lantos by Duncan Hunter, who is also running for the Republican presidential nomination, when he got his turn. Petraeus is still not speaking yet. We’re about 50 minutes and 35 seconds into this, and it looks like they’ve taken some sort of a recess.
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RUSH: Got one more audio sound bite here from Duncan Hunter, responding to Tom Lantos. By the way, Petraeus is now reading his prepared testimony.
HUNTER: Mr. Chairman, let’s — let’s lead off this hearing with this stipulation. That the gentlemen who are appearing before us, and particularly General Petraeus, whose credibility has been attacked all week long by the left in this country, represents the very best in military tradition, that he’s going to testify with an independent, candid view, and he’s going to give us the one thing we ask of all of our military officers, and that’s a candid, independent assessment given with integrity in the same tradition of MacArthur and Eisenhower and Schwarzkopf.
RUSH: That had to make ’em mad. Hunter said let’s start with the stipulation these guys are honorable. Can we start with that? He didn’t say this, but if they prove they’re not honorable, we’ll go there, but let’s not start with the assumption that they’re liars. Let’s not start with the assumption that they’re just a bunch of puppets. But that’s exactly where the Democrats want to start. I think one of the reasons for this is this conference call that Michael Lerner has made public between Democrats and anti-war activists. He says, ‘Right now we would write the story of this Congress as profiles in cowardice. There’s a great deal of frustration with the Democrats in the Congress, a sense almost of betrayal.’ By the way, you could sense that in Osama Bin Laden’s tape. Osama Bin Laden was frustrated last week with the Democrats.
Did you notice, by the way, that after Bin Laden’s tape came out, the Democrats ramped it up? That’s when they started hitting Petraeus even harder. We know who they’re responding to. Look, it is not extreme to say that in a question of allies here, the Democrat Party is much closer to Osama Bin Laden than the American people in terms of what they want. Bin Laden comes out and Kerry was asked a question by George Stephanopoulos about it. Bin Laden says, ‘You’re not doing your job right,’ and Kerry says, ‘Well, we don’t have 60 votes, George.’ He actually responded to it! He actually responded to it from a defensive posture, upset that Bin Laden was upset with him, perhaps. Upset with them?