RUSH: Mike in Quantico, Virginia. Thank you for waiting. Great to have you with us. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you for having me, Rush.
RUSH: You bet, sir.
CALLER: I was calling in regards to the comments Harry Reid made about the Marines and politicizing a training accident death. It’s absolutely disgraceful. I am also a Marine, and it just makes my blood boil, Rush.
RUSH: Let’s listen to it. Grab sound bite number 13. It’s Harry Reid on the Senate floor during general speeches yesterday about the Nevada Marine deaths.
REID: (whispering) It’s quite a big explosion. And though we’ll follow this news very closely, I’m gonna do whatever I can going forward to support the United States military and the families of the fallen Marines. (pause) One of the things in sequester is we cut back in training and maintenance. That’s the way sequester was written. This sequester should go away. We’ve cut already huge amounts of money in deficit reduction. It’s just not appropriate, Mr. President, that our military can’t train and do the maintenance necessary. These men and women, our Marines, were training there in Hawthorne — and with the sequester, it’s gonna cut this stuff back.
RUSH: It’s disgusting, but that’s who he is. He’s blaming the sequester for these seven Marine deaths — and you’re appalled by that, right?
CALLER: Absolutely. If the sequester cut money for training and maintenance, then they would have never been there training to begin with.
RUSH: Well, it’s worse than that. This is an accident. This was going to happen whether there was a sequester or not. Just because the sequester happened does not mean this happened. I get your point. If the sequester really stopped this activity, the activity wouldn’t have been taking place, thus the accident wouldn’t have happened. But here’s… Mike, outside the universe of Marines and a few other people, most low-information people who hear Harry Reid are going to go, “Yeah! Yeah! That’s exactly right! That’s what happens when the government gets smaller and you cut spending. People die! It’s not good.”
It’s not good.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: The reason that there were seven Marine deaths in the training accident in Nevada had nothing to do with the sequester. It had nothing to do with a puny 1% cut of the budget. The mortar rounds seemed to be defective, and that has nothing to do with the sequester. What’s happened is that apparently the Navy and the Marines have stopped all training with them now. Nothing to do with the sequester. But here’s Harry Reid trying to take advantage, make a political point.
I tell you, these people politicize everything, including seven Marine deaths. Seven Marines die and what does Harry Reid do? The first thought he has, “How can I turn this into a political advantage?” And these people claim to be in possession of all the world’s compassion. People like Harry Reid, the Democrat Party, they are the ones with the big hearts. They’re the ones that really care about people. We don’t. We conservatives, we’re just mean-spirited extremists. We order people around and we cut the size of government, putting everybody’s life at risk.
Democrats, they love people, and they care about people, and they’re good people. So seven Marines die in an accident, and the compassionate Democrats start calculating how they can extract a political advantage from those deaths. It’s despicable, not to mention distasteful.