John in Mundelein, Illinois. Welcome, sir, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hello, sir. Thank you for taking my call.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Rush, I wanted to ask you a question about Republicans demands for accountability in administrative oversight by offering you the following comparison and getting your take on it.

RUSH: Okay.

CALLER: When Donald Rumsfeld was secretary of defense, he promised Americans that we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were. They were in and around Tikrit, and the fact that he was either wrong or lying about that resulted in massive loss of human life and a massive waste of taxpayer money, and not one Republican called for his resignation. Now Republicans are calling for Kathleen Sebelius to resign over a dysfunctional website. What does that tell us about Republicans’ priorities in terms of demanding accountability?

RUSH: I don’t think that’s the question.

CALLER: It’s my question.

RUSH: Well, but it’s a non sequitur question. Let’s examine qualifications and intent. Rumsfeld, imminently qualified. Rumsfeld wasn’t the only guy that got the weapons of mass destruction wrong. Colin Powell got it wrong. George Bush. The British intel got it wrong. If they were wrong, everybody got it wrong. Cheney, all these people. Kathleen Sebelius is not qualified to be doing what she’s doing and this Obamacare business is going to end up destroying one-sixth of the US economy. I do not accept one characteristic of the way the left has defined the war in Iraq. I simply don’t accept it. You turned that into a political issue when it was a legitimate part of the War on Terror.

You know, everybody talks about the good intentions of people and how that ought to excuse erroneous or bad or mistake behavior, whatever. If you’re gonna give LBJ and FDR a pass on the destruction of the Great Society because their hearts were in the right place, why isn’t that same attitude extended to people like Rumsfeld and Bush and Cheney, who were trying to do the right thing. I mean, put yourself in their shoes. It’s after 9/11. You’ve got Saddam running around making all these threats. You can’t allow it to happen again. To me this is totally understandable.

I just have never accepted the left’s characterization of the war in Iraq as being unnecessary and waste of time and all that. This business with Obamacare, this is not good. This is ill-intentioned and it does not have a positive outcome. And Sebelius, I don’t even know who’s called for her resignation. I don’t care. The point of this is not to make people resign. The people of this is to defeat their effort, in my mind, to have this not be reversed. I don’t want to ever give up on that, as long as it takes.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s another thing I didn’t hear the Republicans ask yesterday. Why, if 85% of the people in this country have insurance, why did they write a 2,200-page bill and then thousands more pages of regulations to change everything for 15% of the population? Just ask the question. Just put the question out there for people.

RUSH: Okay, okay, okay, we got a lot of e-mail on our last caller wanting to know, “Look, if you guys demanded Sebelius resign, why didn’t you demand Rumsfeld resign?” A couple of things about this. In the first place, and I think most importantly on this, every Democrat voted with Rumsfeld. If you people will remember — and if you don’t, I am more than happy to tell you. When the first authorization for the use of force came up — and Bush sold this for a year and a half. Bush didn’t unilaterally spring this on anybody. He did not do this under cover of darkness. Bush didn’t take us into Iraq with nobody knowing it.

He ran around this country for a year and a half making speeches and the Democrats first opposed it. The vast majority of the American people were all in favor of it. The Democrats demanded to vote again so that they could be seen supporting the war in Iraq at its outset, and Bush graciously put it up for a vote again. He worked with the Republicans in Congress, and the Democrats got a do-over. And the Democrats voted almost — it wasn’t quite — but the Democrats voted unanimously for the war in Iraq.

Everybody forgets this. They voted unanimously. At the outset, they were loaded for bear. They were just as loaded for bear as Rumsfeld, as Colin Powell, as George W. Bush. It was only after that that they decided to pretend they never supported it and turn it into a political issue. And the Democrat Party then shamelessly began on a course to help guarantee defeat in Iraq as a means of advancing their own political agenda. They were doing that at the same time their friends in the media were trying to convince everybody in the country that they were living in an economic recession, when we had unemployment at 4.7 to 5%.

As far as I’m concerned, I will never forget that. My memory is just glowing with the fact that the Bush White House would never respond to any of this. They were impugned, they were maligned, they were mischaracterized, lied about countless times every day. Not once did they defend themselves on it. Not once did Bush even remind people the Democrats all voted for that authorization of force resolution. The Democrats, the vast majority, they voted a second time to authorize the war in Iraq. They became the hypocrites. They then began on a course of action to try to make the American people forget they ever had voted for it.

On this program we went back and played audio of Bill Clinton in 1998 saying the same thing that Bush and Rumsfeld were saying in 2002 and 2003 about the danger posed by Saddam Hussein. Hillary Clinton had echoed her husband. The Democrats, when Clinton was president, were all on the same page of going in and taking Saddam out, 2008. We played the audio sound bites. In 2003 they were all on board, demanded a second vote. It was only when they saw weakness or a moment of opportunity to secure defeat, they were all for securing defeat if they could hang that around Bush’s neck.

That is not at all what’s going on here with us or the Republicans and Kathleen Sebelius. And, by the way, if I remember right, wasn’t McCain demanding that Rumsfeld resign, to show how he could reach across the aisle and be bipartisan? But I’m gonna tell you, folks, as far as I’m concerned there’s no comparison. It’s statecraft, statesmanship, competence, to Donald Rumsfeld and Kathleen Sebelius. We’re not even talking same league. Kathleen Sebelius hasn’t the slightest idea what she’s doing. Kathleen Sebelius is no more qualified to be in the position she’s in than somebody else plucked from Kansas to be put in that job. She has no idea what she’s doing nor does anybody else in this regime.