RUSH: All right, let’s move on to this Department of Homeland Security report. Janet Napolitano — of course, Obama didn’t know about this. The White House is trying to distance itself from this a little bit. Obama just didn’t know! It’s like Bill Clinton didn’t know when Janet Reno blew up Waco, Texas and the Branch Davidians. I will never, never forget. I mean, the Branch Davidian compound is going up in flames with people inside! There are tanks that have fired on this religious compound in Waco, Texas, and they asked Clinton about it. ‘Heh, heh. You have to go ask Janet Reno about that. I’ve been busy in here. I was in a little room off the Oval Office. Talk to the attorney general, ha-ha-ha. I didn’t know about that!’ Of course Obama doesn’t know about this report. Now, our friends at MSNBC, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, wanted to interview Janet Napolitano. So they called the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, and they said, ‘Okay, but you get one question.’ You get one question. Here’s Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski revealing the deal with Janet Napolitano.
BRZEZINSKI: We should be clear that they only wanted one question.
SCARBOROUGH: Yeah.
BRZEZINSKI: On this.
SCARBOROUGH: So this morning I got a call that she was going to be on the show, and they said we could only ask one question.
BRZEZINSKI: That was the agreement.
SCARBOROUGH: About this story yesterday. And I initially said, ‘Well, we’re not going to do it then, because we don’t allow people to tell us what they’re going to talk about.’
BRZEZINSKI: Right.
SCARBOROUGH: So I said, ‘We’ll ask one question, see how she responds,’ and since this Mexico issue is so huge —
BRZEZINSKI: It’s important!
SCARBOROUGH: — we want our viewers to watch. I mean, if she was coming on to, you know, name a new post office, that would have been something, or a book, that would have been interesting. Let’s talk about that.
BRZEZINSKI: Okay.
SCARBOROUGH: We’ll ask our —
BRZEZINSKI: It’s fair.
SCARBOROUGH: — audience whether we should have had her on the show or not under those conditions.
BRZEZINSKI: Because I actually have so many follow-ups.
SCARBOROUGH: Yeah, I had a lot of follow-ups.
RUSH: Is it amazing the rhythm those two have? I mean, Scarborough takes a breath and Mika Brzezinski is right in there — and as soon as she finishes, Scarborough’s finished taking his breath and he just keeps going — and he’ll pause, take a breath, and she back in there. (laughs) So anyway, they made the deal. They weren’t going to make the deal, but they made the deal. One question: Now, I have the cue sheet here with the question. So here it is. The question is longer than the answer. Here’s the question. Joe Scarborough asked it. ‘So we’ll ask you a quick question about some other news and then get to Mexico. The Democrat chairman of the congressional committee that has oversight over your department has expressed some concerns about police guidance that the Department of Homeland Security gave regarding right-wing extremist groups and veterans. Let me read to you what he said and then get your response. He was dumbfounded. He said, ‘This report appears to raise significant issues involving privacy and civil liberties of many Americans, including war veterans, as I’m certain you agree, freedom of association, freedom of speech are guaranteed to all Americans, whether a person’s beliefs, whatever their political orientation, extremist or not.’ That was Congressman Bennie Thompson, the chairman of a House Homeland Security Committee. How would you respond to the Democrat chairman?’ That’s the question. That was the one question that they asked of Napolitano, and here’s what she said.’
NAPOLITANO: The last thing we want to do at the Department of Homeland Security is infringe on anyone’s constitutional or civil rights. I think anybody (sic) needs to take a deep breath. There was, uh, a lot of Washington spin going on yesterday about this report, but all it was saying is, ‘Look, there’s a constantly changing threat environment in the United States. Our job is to protect against terrorism, whether it comes from abroad or internally.’
RUSH: We’re to take a breath? She just piled on! So this report was describing terrorists. ‘Take a deep breath.’ That’s a Clinton line, too (uttered in a number of places.) But take a deep breath, and she went on and I think she made this worse. Now, Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were exactly right about Bennie Thompson. He’s the top House Democrat overseeing the Department of Homeland Security, and he is demanding that officials there explain how and why they wrote and released this report identifying veterans as potential terrorist threats. I guess he thinks the pro-lifers and all that are genuine threats, but he’s upset about the veterans being cast this way. I should also point out, regarding all of this… (sigh) It’s a brilliant point. It’s on the tip of my tongue.
It will come to me in just a second. I want to go back in time to history. I read a book, and I really touted this book, and now I don’t remember the title of it, but Bill Safire, William Safire wrote the book, and it was about a pamphleteer journalist by the name of James Callender. Well, it wasn’t about Callender, but Callender figured prominently in it, and it was a brilliant book, and it exposed just how raunchy the media was back then and in many cases worse in terms of — well, worse than it is today in a lot of ways. But the interesting thing here about this — Oh! Oh! Here’s what I was going to say. This DHS report is just a summary. This was just a declassified summary.
It’s much more in-depth than what they released. It’s a much longer report. What does the whole thing say? That’s what’s interesting. So this whole notion that the Department of Homeland Security is gonna identify threats to the country, inside the border, and they’re basically conservatives. Scandalmonger was the name of Bill Safire’s book. It was Scandalmonger, and it is about James Callender, and he took some literary license here with some of the personal life aspects of James Callender, but you’ll understand why this is important in just a second. This has happened before. The country has tried something like this before. This is fascinating. I want you to listen to this.
‘The Alien and Sedition Acts, 1798, are four laws enacted by the Federalist-controlled US Congress, allegedly in response to the hostile actions of the French Revolutionary government on the seas and in the councils of diplomacy, but [The Alien and Sedition Acts were] actually designed to destroy Thomas Jefferson’s Republican party, which had openly expressed its sympathies for the French Revolutionaries. Depending on recent arrivals from Europe for much of their voting strength, the Republicans were adversely affected by the Naturalization Act, which postponed citizenship, and thus voting privileges, until the completion of 14 (rather than 5) years of residence, and by the Alien Act and the Alien Enemies Act, which gave the President the power to imprison or deport aliens suspected of activities posing a threat to the national government.
‘President John Adams made no use of the alien acts. Most controversial, however, was the Sedition Act, devised to silence Republican criticism of the Federalists.’ Now, this is where it gets interesting. ‘Its broad proscription of spoken or written criticism of the government, the Congress, or the President virtually nullified the First Amendment freedoms of speech and the press. Prominent Jeffersonians, most of them journalists, such as John Daly Burk, James T. Callender, Thomas Cooper, William Duane, and Matthew Lyon were tried, and some were convicted, in sedition proceedings. The Alien and Sedition Acts provoked the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, and did much to unify the Republican party and to foster Republican victory in the election of 1800. The Republican-controlled Congress repealed the Naturalization Act in 1802; the others were allowed to expire (1800–1801).’
So basically the Sedition Act was the key, and it was used to destroy Jefferson’s Republican Party. If you criticized the government you were thrown in jail, you were silenced, you were not able to vote. Immigrants, legal immigrants coming to the country and seeking to join your party, had to wait an initial nine years instead of five, had to wait 14. The purpose that this ended up serving was galvanizing and uniting the Republican Party to oppose this kind of bare-knuckled assault on the First Amendment, and this is what I meant when I said some months ago that it’s likely the Obama administration is going to overreach. At some point they’re going to do something that will be a tipping point. Now, I don’t know that this is it. This is just a summary. This DHS report is just a summary.
It’s bad enough the summary, and she’s not walking away from it. She’s standing firmly behind it. I think she piled on here when she announces we gotta be aware of terrorist threats outside and inside the country. She didn’t try to soothe any of this or change any of it. So if this administration, if — and this is Obama, by the way. This is not her. This is Obama. This is Jeremiah Wright. This is all of these people that Obama’s grown up with that are angry, outraged. ‘The unfair majorities in this country have oppressed long enough, and it’s about time they were dealt with,’ that’s their thinking. So it could well be that if they hang tough with this, and if they actually try to implement this stuff — if you’re driving around with a pro-life bumper sticker or whatever — if they actually try to put people in jail or to somehow prevent them from involving themselves politically, that could become a tipping point.
Now, on the other side of this is the fact that we have a deranged Democrat Party base, which would celebrate that. I mean, I’ve not seen it like this is, in my country before. I’ve never felt like it’s us versus them more than I do now. Ancient history — well, not ancient, but it is starting to repeat itself. Bennie Thompson commanded to know what types of activities the Department of Homeland Security had planned for the next several months to enforce this. And, by the way, Bennie Thompson is no Blue Dog Democrat. This guy, he’s filed suit against George W. Bush. I forget about what. It was something about elections or something; the case was dropped. But Bennie Thompson is no slouch out there.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I hate to break this to Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, but Fox News got three questions with Napolitano today. (laughing) First question, Steve Doocy: ‘A number of people, including the commander of the American Legion, have asked you to apologize to vets over this report of yours. Are you standing by the comments?’
NAPOLITANO: To the extent veterans read it as an accusation, an apology is owed. We greatly respect our veterans. All this was meant to do was to give law enforcement what we call situational awareness, some of the things that go on, some of the things that have happened in the past that could recur, that people just need to be aware of. I’ll meet with the leaders of some of the veterans groups. You know, I have to tell you, I was the United States attorney for Arizona in the nineties when Tim McVeigh bombed the Murrah building in Oklahoma City, and unfortunately, he was a vet, that’s where he got his training, and so when I was told about the report, it rang true with me.
RUSH: Ah, it’s in the report, too, quoting and citing Timothy McVeigh. He was a vet, that’s where he got his training. See, the military trained him to blow up federal buildings. I tell you, these people are hideous. I really cringe when all you people out there call me, ‘Rush, Obama is just trying to unify us, can’t we all just get along?’ Behind this? For crying out loud, he’s not trying to unify anybody, other than coalesce his own base, which he’s already done.