But I have to draw the line here at getting expert analysis of the intelligence bill from one of the Jersey girls on the Today Show today, which is what Matt Lauer did. We have the sound bites of this, and, of course, the Jersey girls are attractive to the media because the media thinks the Jersey girls hate Bush, and they do. Well…they endorsed Kerry. They were sitting in the front row at all those debates and so forth. So that’s coming up. This United Nations business. You know, folks, I sit here. You remember old Dusty Harry and his comments on Sunday about Clarence Thomas’s “embarrassing” opinions? He basically made a racist statement, can we just be honest? Can we just be honest? What Dusty Harry said about Clarence Thomas, if the tables were reversed, would be called racism. He impugned the integrity and the intelligence of a black guy, said a black guy can’t write because he’s black. He didn’t single out anybody else as writing poorly. You ought to read some of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s opinions if you find somebody that has trouble writing, but of course she’s not going to come under any such criticism whatsoever.
And then you’ve got Kofi Annan out there. How in the world can liberals, how can Americans in this country take a look at Clarence Thomas and come up with some sort of a negative view and look at Kofi Annan — and these liberals have absolutely no problem. In fact they love Kofi Annan and think he’s fabulous. We’re dealing with one of the most corrupt and inept individuals that has ever crossed the world scene, Kofi Annan, and yet he is applauded. He is supported; he is praised, because he hates America. He hates this country, and he has attempted to sandbag this country at every step of the way. Get this latest news. This is from Newsday today: “Most people would say countries that tolerate slavery should be ineligible for membership on the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. Same goes for those guilty of crimes against humanity. The presumption is that egregious rights violators have no business on a commission whose prime purpose is supposed to be to protect rights. But in a report last week, a U.N. panel established by Secretary-General Kofi Annan rejected the notion that there should be any standards at all for membership on the Human Rights Commission. That means Sudan need not worry about losing its seat on the 53-member commission even though the country stands accused by the United States of committing genocide in its western Darfur province. At the State Department, frustration over the commission is accelerating, and officials wonder how long the United States can justify its continued membership on the panel if current trends continue. Of particular concern to Washington is an expected move next year to prohibit the introduction of commission resolutions aimed at specific countries.”
So you have this idiotic, worthless Human Rights Commission on which human rights violators can sit, and then this same commission will not be allowed to pass resolutions aimed at specific countries. What’s the point? What is the point? “Led by China, many lesser developed countries resent the emphasis on human rights by the United States and other industrialized democracies. Their priorities are economic rights and economic development. China’s representative on the Annan commission made this view clear, with strong support from African countries, particularly South Africa.”
I just marvel at the inability of our media to cut as much slack to our president as they do to Kofi Annan, not to mention Clarence Thomas. I mean, if Dusty Harry Reid is less than impressed with Clarence Thomas, what must he think of Kofi Annan? What must any reasonable person think of Kofi Annan? He’s an embarrassment to the UN. The UN is an embarrassment to the support of cooperation. Remember, there’s not just one issue here. We have the oil-for-food scandal. We have the flawed idea of the oil-for-food scandal in the first place. Then we’ve got the cover-up of the oil-for-food scandal. We’ve got the dirty trick to focus on an illegal war which is designed to keep us focused on something other than the UN and its ineptitude, and we have the inability of the UN to accomplish anything.
The UN can’t accomplish diddly-squat, and yet this he guy comes in for no criticism whatsoever when calls are made for his resignation. By the way, people in prominent positions who have done much, much less than Kofi Annan would already be out. It’s just an amazing thing to watch here, ladies and gentlemen, and what it means is that the liberals in this country just continue to marginalize themselves. They continue to identify themselves with people who hate this country or oppose this country, and they do so gladly. They happily align themselves with people who are on the other end of the best interests of the United States.
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RUSH: Brian in <a target=new href=”http://www.colts-neck.nj.us/”>Colts Neck, New Jersey</a>. Welcome. Nice to have you with us.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. You opened up with these Jersey girls. I’m from Jersey also and I lost a family member on 9/11. It’s just getting so old with these four. You know, it’s the same thing. It’s their 15 minutes of fame. Not only this, it’s almost over. It’s gone. It’s just the same thing. I don’t know what these people want.
RUSH: You lose anybody? Did you lose anybody 9/11?
CALLER: I did. I lost my brother-in-law, my wife’s brother.
RUSH: All right. Well, in this case have you ever, have you ever thought that the Jersey girls are speaking for you and all the other people in your situation?
CALLER: No, of course not and, as a matter of fact, other families, we do get together. We do kind of laugh at them. I mean, I don’t know who’s feeding them lines, but, you know, it’s not coming– I don’t know these people, obviously, but I don’t know —
RUSH: Well, you know, everybody wants to “make a difference.” Everybody wants to matter, and in some cases getting involved like this and taking up the cause that killed a family member becomes therapy, and then — I’m not saying it’s happened here; but in such cases — you can get dazzled by the fame, and you can get dazzled by the attention, and it can help take the depression away because it gives you focus, a sense of purpose, and you can become almost addicted to that, and I’ll tell you all the ingredients are here for it, because the media goes gaga over these women, and it gives them a sense of purpose, and everybody wants to have a sense of purpose. Everybody wants to matter. Everybody wants to, as the clich? goes, “make a difference.” I always love to say, “Well, you gotta be careful there. Hitler ‘made a difference,’ so you gotta be very careful.” No, no, no, I’m not comparing the Jersey girls to Hitler. Now, don’t anybody go off half crazed here. I’m just saying that it’s understandable in one sense, but I think they’re being exploited at the same time, because they are the only family members that the media has accorded any credibility. Let’s go to the audio sound bites. On the Today Show today Matt Lauer interviewed two of the Jersey girls, Kristen Breitweiser and Beverly Eckert. We have it looks like Kristen Breitweiser here and Lauer says, “Kristen, as you look at this bill on paper right now, the president could sign it by the end of the week. Do you like the way it looks on paper?”
BREITWEISER: I think it’s a good, solid first step. It’s good. It’s going to go a long way to making us safer from terrorists.
LAUER: What are the most important provisions in the bill in your opinion?
BREITWEISER: I think the most important is the DNI, the director of national intelligence. Of course that comes down to who President Bush appoints to that position. And the second most important thing is probably the NCTC which is the fusion center, so that we have all that information, we can connect the dots.
LAUER: Is there something in the bill, Kristen, that’s not there or is there something not in the bill that you wish would be there that makes it less potent?
BREITWEISER: I personally think that the most important thing, speaking about terrorists’ mobility is about terrorist financing. I disagree that it is driver’s licenses for non-immigrants, but I would have liked to see more of terrorist financing being addressed in the bill, but going forward we’re going to take care of that.
RUSH: Well, okay, the Jersey girls on the case, going to continue to write legislation out there. It will be supported by the Democrats. You understand what’s happening here, folks? You understand what’s happening here is that Bush is running rings around these people, and I will explain all that in due course. They think they’re getting what they want, then when they get it it’s not what they want. Then when they theory that Porter Goss’ name is at the top of the list to head it up then they really don’t like it, and Ms. Breitweiser tossing in this Sensenbrenner issue of driver’s licenses for “non-immigrants,” illegal immigrants, I mean, that’s just pure politics. That’s one of the dividing lines in the issue of left versus right, and the left doesn’t want to go there because they don’t want to upset the Hispanic vote, and Sensenbrenner is more concerned about protecting the country based on the fact that the 9/11 hijackers are able to get 63 valid driver’s licenses.
In fact, do you know that Mohamed Atta, who was a ringleader of the 19, was stopped for a traffic violation with an expired visa — he should have been tossed out of the country — two weeks before 9/11. He was stopped with an expired visa but because he had a legal driver’s license, they gave him a warning, you know, a little bit of probation. Now, I don’t know if anything in this bill is gonna stop that, because there’s nothing in here about illegal driver’s licenses, and maybe Ms. Breitweiser knows. She seems to be the expert on this bill. I don’t know if there’s anything that would have prevented Mohamed Atta from getting probation when stopped with an expired visa. Next question from Matt Lauer. “When the bill first got stalled, there was some criticism. Some people said President Bush, while publicly endorsing it, might not have been doing enough privately to gain its passage. Are you satisfied with the president’s involvement in this process, Kristen?”
BREITWEISER: I voted for President Bush in 2000. (Laughs) I would have hoped that he would have gotten this done a lot sooner than, you know, where we’re at now. But certainly he was supportive of the bill. He could have opposed it, and I hope going forward he will continue to support things like the terrorist financing, like the immigration reforms, and congressional oversight. We need an enormous amount of, you know, congressional oversight —
LAUER: You’re worried that there’s still oversight in many different committees within Congress and it’s not a unified committee.
BREITWEISER: That’s missing out of this bill. That was stripped from the bill, and that needs to go back in.
RUSH: Oh, there’s not enough congressional oversight, we need more bureaucracy. Why do you think that was pulled out? (laughing) You want to really gum up the works here you make every member of Congress and every senator a secretary of state in his or her own mind, you’re never going to get any intelligence up the chain of command. “Oversight.” I know, review it when it screws up and so forth. But you can just see that this continues to be a political issue with these people. It’s not about terrorism. It’s not about safety. It’s a political issue: “I wish Bush would have done it sooner. Well, this isn’t in the bill. We’re going to get it in there.” I’ll tell you the thing about this that bothers me just overall. You know, she was asked in the first bite, “Do you like the bill on paper?” What’s the difference, on paper or wherever? Does anybody really think that a piece of paper or a series of pieces of paper with legislation written on these pieces of paper is going to stop terrorism? It’s the action that’s going to follow all this and the action that needs to take place is an actual reform of intelligence gathering.
We need to get rid of the Jamie Gorelick wall if it still exists. We need to get rid of the hiring quotas and restrictions on agents that can work for the CIA. We need to have people out there, not here, out there infiltrating these organizations and we have to be able to do business with some unsavory types in order to do this, and that was proscribed, prohibited by the Church Commission way back in the 70s. That’s what commissions generally do: They gum up the works. So you get all these people involved in this, and if this causes there to be a greater focus outside the country on tracking these people and so forth, and as it’s said, “connecting the dots,” fine and dandy. But the idea, the thing that just continues to grate on me is that yesterday we didn’t have a bill, and we were scared to death, and, “Oh, no!” Today we’ve got a bill and, “Whew, boy, we’re safer,” and that kind of thinking is dangerous, because a bunch of words on a piece of paper from one day to the next do not enhance our security in any way, shape, manner, or form, and the idea that passing a law dealing with people who don’t care about the law is gonna have some impact on them is just shortsighted as it can be to me.
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RUSH: Here’s Bill in Amherst, New York. Welcome, sir, to the program. Nice to have you with us.
CALLER: Thanks, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: I’m calling about an earlier caller that had talked about the Jersey girls. Beverly Eckert is my sister-in-law, and her husband, Sean, her husband, I think he was a decent, genuinely decent man whose murder has left a lot missing in many, many lives, and I think that to denigrate everyone who had attempted to move the intel bill to completion is misguided. I remember yourself saying that after the ’93 bombing, Jamie Gorelick had built a wall —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — between the FBI and other agencies, and to me, although I admit we’re not any safer today than we were yesterday, I think if the provisions of the bill are followed up, if there really is a sharing of information, then people like Mohamed Atta and his accomplices wouldn’t be able to get in the country or stay in the country and hijack planes to kill humans.
RUSH: Well, that’s entirely possible, but one of Sensenbrenner’s problems was that Atta got in the country and he was on an expired visa when caught in a moving traffic violation with a legal driver’s license. Had he not been able to do that, had he not been able to get a driver’s license it might have put a big crimp in their plans. They had to steal. They would have engaged in more criminal activity which would increase the risk they ran of getting caught. But nobody is opposed to improved intelligence. But that caller you’re talking about also lost family members, and what he said was that he resents the fact that Ms. Eckert, Ms. Breitweiser, and the others known as the Jersey girls have now been accorded by the media the status of speaking for all of the 9/11 families, and in his mind they didn’t or don’t, and he thought that some of them had been, you know, exploited for political purposes, having endorsed Kerry and this sort of thing, that’s what he was talking about. Anyway, I’m glad you called. It’s great to have you on the program.
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