Democrats Won’t Win with Vietnam Redux

RUSH: This week? Wait, wait, wait, hold, hold, hold – this week, it’s Tuesday.

CALLER: I mean the end of last week and this week.

RUSH: Okay.

CALLER: You know, all over the budget, Medicare, and all that kind of stuff. Now, I understand that all of that’s important but I saw him yesterday on TV, in his cabinet meeting or, you know, whatever meeting?

RUSH: Yes, that’s what it was, yes, yes.

CALLER: And the man looked – his hair is turning white, Rush, he looks like he’s got arrows coming from him in every direction. You see it on his face, and he’s a good man. He’s got a good heart, he’s a good commander-in-chief, and the Democratic candidates ought to be ashamed of themselves. All they want is to get in there and have power. That’s all they want.

RUSH: That’s what their job is, their job is to attack. Now, you have to understand something. They’ve got no choice. The Democrats cannot be honest about what they want to do. If the Democrats are honest about what they want to do and will do, they’ll lose. They’re going to lose anyway, but they’ll lose really big. These people are such antiques. You know, I raised the specter yesterday that we could have a 1980 or 1960 election. Somebody else has written no, it’s going to be more like ’84. If you listen to Mondale and listen to Kerry, it sounds like interchangeable parts.

You might have a convention this year where they’re going to bring Mario Cuomo out of mothballs to deliver his anti-shining city on the hill speech that he gave in 1984 in San Francisco. These people are still playing the two Americas card, the class envy card and I’ve got a great piece today in the Stack of Stuff about that and why it exists and who’s behind it, but really it’s a great think piece, William Tucker wrote it and I’ll get to it here before the program ends.

But I mean that’s all they can do is attack Bush, that’s all these people, the Democrats, have been doing for I think some 20 years, 24 years now since Reagan won big in 1980. They know nothing else. They can’t tell us who they are, what they believe, or they’ll be skunked.

CALLER: But they seem rabid. I mean…

RUSH: Yes.

CALLER: …did you see it?

RUSH: And they are.

CALLER: You know the scary thing, Rush, is this is a different time. I mean we were under attack, we’re at war.

RUSH: Christie!

CALLER: ?and Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden would love to see George Bush out of there because they know he does what he means and he does what he says.

RUSH: Christie, now, I know you’re paying closer attention than this. This is civics class in the eighth grade. This is 2004 and we are talking about the modern-day Democratic Party.

CALLER: So it makes?

RUSH: Wait a minute, now. This is the bunch that wants to turn our national security over to the UN; this is the bunch that doesn’t think it’s a big deal to get Saddam; this is the bunch that wants to take away the war on terrorism from the military and give it away to a bunch of lawyers in New York and Boston.

CALLER: Absolutely.

RUSH: Well, then understand what we’re dealing with here.

CALLER: I know, but?

RUSH: Well, that’s who these people are. What you’re getting from the Democrats is who they are, and Bush knows this better than any of the rest of us do. None of what they’re doing ought to surprise you, just like Janet Jackson flashing a boob on Sunday should not have surprised anybody. It’s been heading in this direction; this is who they are. The action here is not to get mad at them for doing – well, you can get mad at them for doing it – but it’s not new. It’s who these people are. This is like getting mad at a tiger for attacking a smaller animal. That’s what tigers do. I mean this is who the Democrats are. Instead of wasting time saying outrageous things, I can’t believe they’re doing that, send ’em packing. Make ’em pay the price for this kind of irresponsibility.

I mean, these are the people that consider George W. Bush a greater enemy than the people who would hijack our airplanes and fly them into our buildings. They really do. Folks, I know it’s early and I may say things later on that contradict this, but as of today, February 3rd, 2004, I just don’t see these people winning no matter what they do in 2004. I must tell you, and it’s not that I’ve been at this a long time and am bored by it because of that. I am bored by the lack of originality and ingenuity among the Democrats; I am bored by the time-honored, tested, failing techniques they use. I think the feeling that I have is that this is all an exercise in futility.

Now, I know some of you think that this is going to be a closer election, and it may be a very close election. I just don’t see these people winning. They don’t offer what the American people want, and you’re not getting right now, because of the just concentrated mass coverage by the media of the Democrat primaries, you’re not getting an accurate portrayal of where the American people are where these Democrats are concerned. All you’re getting is a bunch of Democrats talking about Democrats, Democrat voters being polled, Democrat voters answering questions about Bush.
You’re getting nothing else yet. It’s the wrong time to be affected and impacted by this. It’s way too soon. It’s way too soon to start thinking that this is going to matter by the time November of this year comes around. I think, to get outraged at these people is sort of to miss the point. I think it’s better to remain cool, calm, and collected, and put this thing in perspective to people and illustrate how it’s just really dangerous stuff if they would win, obviously. We don’t live in a world where presidents are never going to be criticized even in times of war. This is not 1944, 1940, 1943, with FDR. It doesn’t exist anymore.
See, back then, the Democrats were the power, the Democrats ran the show, the Democrats were the natural order of things, and so the Republicans knew their role. They were a happy minority as long as they got the golf invitations to play with certain Democrat leaders. And as long as the restaurants in Washington let them in three or four times a week, the Republicans were happy. It’s a different era. Republicans are running the show; the Democrats are fit to be tied. This is almost like the politburo being kicked out of office by the North Koreans. You know, the North Koreans running Moscow and of course Brezhnev and the gang want it back. That’s how the liberals are looking at this. They’ve been supplanted by… they can’t believe this guy George Bush is beating them. They don’t think he did. They are totally out of perspective on this. They’ve lost all rationale.
COMMERCIAL BREAK

RUSH: Here’s Jim in Cape Cod out in Massachusetts, welcome to the program, great to have you with us, sir.

CALLER: Yes. Rush, I’m glad to be on the phone to you, too, I wanted to talk about the issue of Vietnam and the Democrats and whether we’re going to relive it again. First of all, I have three brothers and two of my brothers and I were drafted or went into the service in 1966. One of my brothers is a Vietnam vet with a three campaign stars on his Vietnam ribbon. He has no other ribbons because they lost his records and gave awards to other people who didn’t fight. So I don’t believe in ribbons at all, and I don’t think this issue about what happened in Vietnam is going to be solved now, and Kerry isn’t the man to solve it. It seems to me that it’s a situation that we can’t solve because we didn’t solve it when we were supposed to, and to make that an issue now is a demonstration that the Democrats really have no issues to talk about.

RUSH: That’s true, but there’s also, as I have said, a little bit more going on than just the fact they’ve got nothing else to talk about. And, you know, you’ve got to look at who they were in the 1960’s, counterculture, anti-establishment and so forth. Now they want to be the establishment. Now they think they are the establishment, that they come from the counterculture, they’re the anti-America and the flag burners, building-bombers and all this sort of stuff so what they’re going to try to do is refight the Vietnam War; they’re going to try to redefine it so that their actions back then were the definition of right, just, moral, and all that. And in the process, they can’t help but say that those who engaged in the fighting and those who engaged in the practice of the war were somehow immoral and wrong. So there’s a little bit more to this than just Bush didn’t go to war and Kerry did. This is all about validating the counterculture of the 1960’s, as they seek power on the basis of all those beliefs. And this really has been a long-term objective of theirs, and they got pretty close in the Clinton years, and it’s just continuing now.

But you’re right. I can’t imagine the American people wanting a presidential campaign in 2004, in the midst of the war on terror, to be fought over whatever it was about Vietnam that tore us apart. I agree with you, I don’t think the American people want to go back and revisit Vietnam in 2004 in an effort to try to put the country back together again. If the country is being torn apart it’s by Al-Qaeda and other terrorists, and it is that enemy that most Americans want dealt with, not the imaginary enemy of whatever the Democrats and the counterculture types of the sixties think they were fighting. So let ’em – if McAuliffe welcomes this debate, by God, let’s give him the debate, if it’s what he wants, if this is how they want to run for president.

You know, I’ll tell you something else. These people have such a self-esteem problem when it comes to matters military. And I’m telling you folks, this has got to stand out, at some point. Three weeks ago, at most four weeks ago, a Democrat candidate with those same medals and those same ribbons and that same Vietnam War service was (raspberry) zero, finished, written off. There wasn’t one shred of excitement about this guy and his ribbons and his medals at the DNC or anywhere else in the Democratic Party. He wasn’t even going to win New Hampshire; he was 30 points behind in his neighboring home state; he was zilch, zero, nada, nowhere, and all this stuff that they now claim is his claim to fame and qualifies him to be president qualified him to be 30 points behind the leader less than a month ago. Now all of a sudden the Democrats with such an aimless, empty strategy, have glommed onto this? Well, when this bombs, what’s their strategy going to be 30 days from now? I mean this is not a presidential election issue. They’re going to try to make it one now. It will die out even if it does become one.
But the utter phoniness of these people, the utter example this is of their lack of a core. They are hop-scotching to whatever they think gives them the moral high ground. And they have been living with this self-esteem problem because everybody and they themselves know how weak on military issues they are. Look at what the Democratic primary debates turned on. Who did and who didn’t vote for the war on terrorism, the vote for Iraq. I mean this party practically tore itself apart over that single vote. This is a guy, their nominee now, [who] votes against every weapons system that comes down the pike, votes to weaken the CIA, votes to tear it apart as we know it, votes to do all this stuff that will exact damage on the very institutions we need to fight the war on terrorism. And so all of a sudden they, out of the blue, quite by accident, they’ve got a candidate with Vietnam ribbons and all a sudden they are the biggest military experts and hawks, and they want to run on their strength on military issues? These people are sitting ducks! They are setting themselves up as the phony baloney, plastic banana, good-time roller, sitting ducks that they are. I’m stunned at this. When you look at the time line from just four weeks ago and you look at how these people were tearing each other apart over who voted for the war in Iraq and who didn’t, and now, less than 30 days later, these guys are all General Douglas MacArthur? It ain’t washing with me, folks. It isn’t washing with me, folks, for those of you not in Rio Linda.
END TRANSCRIPT