RUSH: CNN, I just saw a portion of this. I’m sure it’s CNN International, trying to humanize once again Hassan Nasrallah, the grand pooh-bah sheik of the Hezbos. Last night on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, this is how the CNN staff announcer opened the program.
ANNOUNCER (with music): Deep inside Hezbollah country, a corner of the war you don’t always see and you’ll only see here. This is a special edition of Anderson Cooper 360. Crisis in the Middle East, day 27.
RUSH: Oh, we’re counting the days now. (Panting). I’m panting with excitement, bated breath. Why, inside Hezbo country. Well, I was hooked. So let’s go. Anderson Cooper says, “There are those who say that Israel underestimated the strength of the Hezbos. We have CNN’s Tom Foreman look at where the Hezbos get their military strength.”
FOREMAN: Hezbollah may seem like many guerrilla armies, but military analysts say Hezbollah is much better prepared than most for open warfare.
DAN BYMAN: (Georgetown Center for Peace and Security): Hezbollah’s forces are brave. They know how to find cover. They know how to use their weapons effectively. Most guerrilla groups don’t. They fight poorly. They run away in the face of danger.
FOREMAN: Another thing Hezbollah has going for it is shear geography. Their homeland here in southern Lebanon is full of mountains and trails and little villages, and they have had almost 25 years to dig in, and Hezbollah has help. Decades of running social programs, hospitals, and schools for Shiite Muslims have produced allies willing to provide a haven for Hezbollah.
RUSH: Here we go again! Last time I was here in New York, which is not that long ago, shortly after this thing broke out, we heard about what a great bunch of social works the Hezbos are in an attempt to humanize them. Yes, they have hospitals, and they have programs, social programs at schools for Shi’ite Muslims! I guess that’s where they teach them to strap bombs on each other and blow themselves up? And then they say Hezbos have help. But did you hear them say in this segment that the help was coming from Iran? No. Did you hear them say the help has come from Syria? No. I wonder if in the ensuing bouts that we have we will hear that the help is coming from Iran. Of course we won’t, folks, because that’s not the story line. No!
What we’re going to hear is they’re brilliant tacticians, guerrilla fighters, never been anybody like ’em! They’re brave. They know how to find cover. They know how to use their weapons effectively. Most guerrilla groups don’t. They fight poorly. They run away in the face of danger, but not the Hezbos — and of course they have help. I’m going to tell you something, folks, this royally offends me because this is nothing but spin, once again nothing but PR. All of this BS about how tough Hezbollah is; let me ask some important military questions. Has Hezbollah taken one inch of Israeli land? No. Have the Hezbos won a single battle? No. Have they taken out Israel’s infrastructure? No. They’re lobbing rockets into towns. They haven’t accomplished a damn thing.
Unless you want to say they’re making it tough on the Israelis than they’ve had it before to wipe ’em out, but we’re not even sure that’s the case because we don’t know at what force strength the Israelis are actually proceeding with here. This is nothing more than a PR victory that is being anointed the Hezbos, meaning no victory at all. But here’s a classic example of the media trying to help ’em. It’s not just CNN. New York Times, we had a couple stories on Sunday, shared with you yesterday, it’s on the website, about how great these guys are and how tough they are and what odds they’re up against and so forth. They’re purely pursuing a PR victory, and the media is helping them get it. You cannot find in strict military terms traditional signs of victory or success, and yet it’s being assigned to them. Here another one. Anderson Cooper with an exchange with a reporter, Tom Foreman, again fascinated by the Hezbos.
COOPER: Tom, it’s fascinating. I mean, they’re fighting a guerrilla war yet in many ways Hezbollah acts as though they are a government within a government.
FOREMAN: They have all the advantages of being guerrillas. They can move quickly. But they are in many ways acting like a government in this region, and that’s no accident. Hezbollah has grown much better at manipulating its public image. It wants to look like —
RUSH: Stop the tape, stop the tape. How is that possible, Mr. Foreman? Do you think you might be complicit? This is amazing to me, and the Hezbos, they have grown better at manipulating their public image. I guess Bill Clinton was pretty good at it, too, because you looked the other way, or you helped him craft an image that he didn’t deserve, and you’re doing the same thing for a bunch of terrorists, calling them guerrillas, marveling at their tactics and their bravery and their social work. This is obscene, folks. It is genuinely obscene. Here is the rest of this.
FOREMAN: — want to look like a real army for a real nation, even though they are not, fighting against another real army, and they want to look like the underdogs who are standing up against it.
RUSH: Do not want to look like a real army! How in the world can these guys say this? They’re dressed up as civilians! How in the world can it be said they want to look like a real army? And don’t tell me tactics. You don’t see them on the move into Israel, you don’t see them advancing, you don’t see them doing anything that you do to achieve military victory. My God, this is absurd. This goes back and reminds me of the conversation Anderson Cooper had with this clown from the New Yorker, “You know, it’s really, really interesting how anti-Semitic Nasrallah is. He’s so open about it. He’s so outspoken about his anti-Semitism. It’s really interesting Anderson.”
“Yes, it is, Jeffrey, it’s really interesting.”
It’s amazing what interests these guys.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: All right. ‘A Hezbollah fighter captured by Israel has told interrogators he received training in Iran and arrived there on a flight from Syria, a tape of the interrogation released by the Israeli army showed yesterday. During questioning the man also said he took part in the cross-border raid on July 12 in which two Israeli soldiers were captured, the incident that sparked the current conflict. ‘We trained in Iran,’ the man, who gave his name as Mahmoud Ali Suleiman, told the interrogator. ‘We went from Beirut in civilian cars … to the airport in Damascus.’ Suleiman, who gave his age as 22, said between 40 and 50 people went with him for the training, which involved instruction in the use of anti-tank weapons. He didn’t say when the training took place or how long it lasted.’
Now, this is not news to me, and it’s not being widely reported in the Drive-By Media, but nevertheless, it’s not the storyline. You’re not going to find Big Media reporting it, ladies and gentlemen, because it doesn’t fit the storyline. This is the beleaguered little guerrilla band that does great social work, and has hospitals and ambulances and they feed the poor and they clothe the hungry and they do all these other things. They can’t be tied to Iran! That would destroy the whole notion of a bunch of small little victims up against big, bad Israel. Yeah. In fact, we’ll probably get a children’s book in the public school system in this country not long from now entitled ‘The Little Guerrilla Band That Could,’ and it’ll be all about the Hezbos.
‘Arab nations…’ I told you this. I told you this would be the case. I told you this yesterday when this resolution between the United States and France was first announced by the president. ‘Arab nations will press the UN Security Council on Tuesday to demand an immediate Israeli pullout from south Lebanon to make way for the Lebanese army in any resolution to end Israel’s four-week-old war with’ the Hezbos. Not possible. ‘According to the resolution there’s going to be an international force go in there and not the Lebanese.’ Well, the Lebanese army will. That’s a joke, too, but the Israelis are not leaving, and the Arabs are going to say, ‘We’re not doing the deal for the Israelis. Get out of Lebanon.’ What does that tell you about who’s winning this?
We get all these reports about how great this little band of guerrillas that could is doing, and yet who is it that has made incursions into enemy territory, continues to rout them out. It’s not the Hezbos. ‘United Nations human rights council–‘ oh, whoopee ‘–will hold a special session this week to examine alleged rights violations in the month-old war in Lebanon, a UN spokeswoman said on Tuesday. Now, how stupid is that? We’re talking about a war, human rights violations. ”A special session of the U.N. Human Rights Council is planned this week. We received an official request,’ U.N. spokeswoman Marie Heuze told a news briefing. It is expected to be held on Thursday or Friday in Geneva. The meeting was sought by a group of mainly Muslim countries…’
What all this means is that the Israelis are winning. They’re just trying to find any way to stop this they can. So the Hezbos, The Little Guerrilla Band That Could, could be rearmed with surface-to-air missiles from Iran. ‘U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Monday that the incident appeared to fit a pattern of violations of,’ talking about Qana here. ‘Annan said on Monday that the incident appeared to fit a pattern of violations of international law marking the fighting between Israel and’ the Hezbos. The real pattern here is the anti-Israel pro-terrorist, pr- rogue Arab state behavior of the United Nations led by Kofi Annan. That’s what the pattern is here, and I’m sorry to say another resolution is just the furtherance of that same pattern. Jerry in Mansfield, Ohio, glad you waited, sir, welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Rush, an absolute universal pleasure, my friend.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I praise every day that you’re there telling the other side of the story.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very, very much. I appreciate it.
CALLER: Hey, I just wanted to know if I could get me a comment here, because I’m calling from Ohio, and I know that’s how we speak here, as was eloquently stated by —
RUSH: John Kerry when he went for the hunting license. ‘Get me a hunting license.’
CALLER: Absolutely. I wasn’t appalled or anything by that, but that’s not my comment. My comment to your screener was, I’m assuming the media really being like a ring announcer, you can watch a fight, and each corner has to be given equal opportunity and equal praise and equal capability in order to make it a fight, Rush. They expect it to go 12 rounds just like anything else because if you don’t build the hype you don’t get the viewers. And the media is playing that, they need a protagonist and an antagonist and they’ll make them both this way. In this particular case, the winner can’t be portrayed as the winner.
RUSH: Time-out. Time-out. I have to mildly disagree, on this basis. I think in this case and in many other cases, the Drive-By Media couldn’t care less about ratings. They couldn’t care less. If CNN cared about ratings, if MSNBC cared about ratings, they would have got tired of being in last place and second-to-last place years ago, but they don’t. They’re content to sit there in last place. They’re content to have the same garbage on the radio that’s keeping them in last place in our television, and second-to-last place. The New York Times is losing subscribers. The LA Times is losing subscribers. Newspapers around the country are losing subscribers. I don’t see any changes in the coverage of anything designed to recapture subscribers or viewers that all these places have lost.
The big three evening newscasts combined have lost tons of audience over the last 15 to 20 years. I haven’t seen significant changes on the part of any of these people to try to get that audience back. I see stubbornness. I see them insulting the stupidity of the audience. I see them telling each other the audience is a bunch of idiots. I think that most of these losing media outfits are reporting for each other. I think a reporter on MSNBC is trying to impress other reporters at other networks, not inform his viewers or her viewers about what’s really going on. They’re trying to demonstrate to each other how they are part of the clique.
When one of them says that Cheney brings gravitas to the administration, 50,000 of them join in and say the same thing so they will all know that they are all equally brilliant. If they cared about ratings they’d be doing something about the fact that they’re in the cellar. No, I’ll tell you what’s more important than anything here, Jer, and that’s the agenda — and the agenda is we hate Bush. Bush is a fraud, Bush did not win the election in 2000, he stole it, he shouldn’t have won in 2004. Power has been taken away from us and our guys, and we’re going to get it back no matter what we have to do, including destroy foreign policy in the immediate term. And therefore we hate every Bush ally. And if Bush is on the side of Israel, then we are going to be out side of the Hezbos. And we’re going to tell everybody what great social workers they are, educators they are, how they run great hospitals and so forth and so on, and that they’re just a ragtag little guerrilla band that could. It’s all a bunch of lies.
END TRANSCRIPT
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