But I’ll never forget the first thing that I said when I hit this studio and microphone that afternoon — and I am going to say it here going to today — that the attack on 9/11 was not an attack on America, and this attack on London today is not an attack on London. This is an attack on Western Civilization, and they are going to continue until everybody that’s opposed these kind of attacks unites and gets together and fights this as it should be fought. We’ve got too much dissension in the ranks. We got a too much political partisanship going on — not just in this country but around the world — and there are too many people taking too many actions that encourage the kind of thing that happened in London today, and weaken the resolve of those who would prefer to stand against it. Make no mistake about this: this was not an attack on London, and this has nothing to do with the fact that the Brits joined us in Iraq. It has nothing to do with it. The Brits have started pulling troops out of the Iraq, by the way. They’ve announced that. It may have to do with the G8. It may have to do with it. This kind of thing was happening before 9/11. This kind of thing was happening before we went to Iraq. This kind of thing was happening when Bill Clinton was president. This happened to Americans all over the world. It happened to us in 1993 at the World Trade Center, in an attack that’s similar to this in terms of scope, 40 people — 33, 40 people — somewhere in that neighborhood. Okay, 33 confirmed dead. But the bus fatalities are not counted yet, over a thousand injured and 150 seriously. It’s not a dead-on parallel, but it’s fairly close to what happened in 1993. We didn’t do diddly-squat. Oh, I take that back. We did. We prosecuted. Terrorism cannot be wished away, folks, and it cannot be ignored and it cannot be prosecuted away in the courts. We are not going to win the war on terror with federal judges usurping the authority of the commander-in-chief in terms of how he gets information from prisoners, how he fights the war on terror.
But that is, in fact, an attempt being made by the left in this country today — and we’ve tried it that way. We tried it that way throughout the nineties. You prosecute somebody you find and you convict them, and all do you is anger the terrorists who demand their release — and if you don’t release the convicted terrorists, then they promise to attack you again, and that may be an element of what’s happening here in Great Britain, too. But all of these incidental reasons — the G8 summit, the war in Iraq — miss the boat. This is an attack on Western Civilization, and it is an attack based on the belief of those who commit them that they can get away with it, and that they can continue to get away with it. You got two things you can
I wonder if the Brits will do what we did after 9/11. I wonder if the Brits will convene, at their version of the state department, a seminar exploring the question: Why do they hate us? You can do those seminars all day long, and you can even get the answer right, and it isn’t going to help you a bit. The evidence, the terrorist attack, not only civilization today, but the left, the Hollywood crowd, the music crowd, the kumbaya crowd. Today was supposed to launch the G8 meeting. Leaders of the most prosperous nations are being coaxed to show up and for the umpteenth time save Africa, end hunger, end global warming, end poverty. Whether you buy the solutions that were on the table or not, the goals are certainly high-minded. You could even say the goals are civilized: end poverty, end hunger, end global warming. But there’s a war against civilized thoughts out there, and the world gets another wake-up call today because here at this big leftist conclave known as the G8 summit, it’s occurring not far from where the blast took place — and make no mistake: the terrorists have as one of their purposes besides the death and mayhem to become the subject matter of the G8 summit. They want the attention focused on them. Tony Blair says he’s not going to let that happen. We’ll see. Hope he doesn’t let that happen. But nobody is safe, is the point. You cannot make friends with these people and maintain your culture or your identity and your way of life. The healing nature of time, some people forget what happens. Others you think that the passage of time will just enable everybody to wish this kind of evil away. But thank goodness for Bush because he understood it from day one. Today we get another reminder and another opportunity for even more people to understand it now who maybe have had it slip from their mind. Maybe it’d gotten caught up in the notion of “it’s not going to happen again.” Some people are probably saying, “Well, it happened over there. I’m not worried about that.” You may as well considered this an attack on us, folks. It’s not attack on our way of life; it’s an attack on our civilization.
I just watched the briefing here that Michael Chertoff did. He’s our director of homeland security, and he said something that a lot of people I think are going to sniff at. (sniff, sniff, sniff) “Oh, yeah, easy for you to say.” But he said, “You know, when it comes to transit — public transit, train stations, subways, airports, those kinds of things, shipping ports — we don’t have the official government personnel to watch everything that happens there. We need you.” He said, “I want you Americans, go to work today, use the public transit system, just be more vigilant,” and I’m sure some people sniffed. “Oh, yeah easy for you to say ‘be more vigilant.'” Well, folks, it’s going to require this kind of an effort. When you get right down to it, we are a people that can take care of ourselves. We do so in so many other walks of life but some believe when it comes to government we expect government to do everything for us, protect us, defend us and so forth. In circumstances like this you never know who you might see or run into that doesn’t look normal, that doesn’t look right, looks suspicious, and you can report it to somebody who didn’t see it. It is going to take that kind of involvement and that kind of awareness — and a lot of people just don’t want to go there because it’s an interruption in a carefree life. But this is just another wake-up call and another reminder that civilization, Western Civilization is under constant attack. Make no mistake: it was planned; it was coordinated and it was timed to coordinate with the G8 meeting. It was. I think all these other reasons that people are putting forth today — well, the one I would throw out would be the Olympics; nobody knew London was going to get the Olympics ’til this week. I don’t think that has anything to do with it. I think the large factor is it’s just our way of life, and the surprise factor. They continue to succeed in creating these attacks and these events when they are least expected in the places where people feel the safest, and that should alarm everybody.
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It’s like we don’t need reporters standing in five inches of snow in the wintertime to tell us it’s snowing. All we have to do is look out the window. But if you go back, if you go back to World War II, Britain got far worse than this. They were bombed daily by the Nazis. The only difference is they knew it was coming, and they were prepared for it, but look what happened. They rebuilt the country. These are tough people over there, just as we are tough people here. Here’s the morbid part. I think will be morbid to some of you — and I’m really going to apologize if this offends you. You’ve got how many millions of people running through this transit system in rush hour in the United Kingdom, and what do we have? We have 33 dead and 150 seriously wounded. I wouldn’t call this a successful terror attack. I wouldn’t say these guys missed the boat. If I were the Brits I’d stand up and say, “You think this is going to deter us? You think this is going to stop us from being who we are? We’ve been through worse than this. We have dealt with worse than this, and we have triumphed over this. You think this is something? You think you’ve done something great today? You’re nothing but a bunch of cowards. You don’t have the guts to put on a uniform and attack us and tell us why. You have to put suicide bombs on some of your worthless members, send them on board a bus or hide out in some deep, dark subway tunnel and then blow up people. Well, we don’t cower from cowards.” Now, I would love seeing somebody say this today, instead of, “Oh, no! Oh, no! It happened again! It happened again! Oh, no! Are we next? What are we going to do, Mabel? Mabel! What…? Can the Supreme Court stop it? Is there anything Rehnquist can do?” Now, if this offends you, again, as Dick Durbin, I apologize for hurting your feelings. But I think I’m being pretty consistent in this, folks.
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RUSH: So Senator Schumer, we heard yesterday — Senator Chuck Schumer from New York — decided that this Supreme Court battle is “war.” Democrats are going to declare war on the Supreme Court nomination. Senator, might I ask you to consider something else? You might just want to think about joining us and declaring war on Islamic terrorism first, and then you can play your silly little ideological games however you wish and you can lose again and again and again later. But there’s something that does take precedence. Now, I know it may not happen today, but I know in ensuing days and coming days, the left-wing kooks that have become the mainstream of the Democratic Party are going to gin up and they’re going to come out with their own explanations for this attack in London. Here is just a sample. “It was a plot conceived by Karl Rove. The plot was designed to lift the president’s poll numbers as he went into the G8 summit and the Supreme Court vacancy, not to mention a trick to make everybody bend over and willingly accept the new Patriot Act or whatever judicial appointment Bush wants or whatever defense budget increase he wants.” You’re going to hear — and probably wackier things than this in the coming days. Well, somebody will accuse Blair of knowing in advance and getting out of town.
You know, make sure he’s at the G8 summit while London was attacked. He was out of town — just like that poet laureate in New Jersey? Amiri Baraka who called up Sheila Jackson Lee. They talked about it and they convinced themselves that the Israelis were behind 9/11 because “all the Jews got out of the World Trade Center before the attack.” So here’s Blair getting out of London before these things happen, the G8. You can just imagine the kind of things that are going to be said, and the reason for this, if I may just get political for just a brief moment, I told you. You’ve been asking me since 9/11, “Rush, if it happens again, does it hurt Bush?” No, it’s not going to hurt the one guy that’s out there trying to do something about it. The people that are trying to pretend it didn’t happen — a-hem — I can name you any Democrat senator, any number of the American media, trying to pretend 9/11 didn’t happen, trying to make you think that all of these efforts to stop another attack are just a waste of money and some sort of silly little personal vendetta that Bush has, whatever excuse they came up with. The Dick Durbins of the world that are out there wailing and moaning about G’itmo and Abu Ghraib and so forth, they’re the ones that are going to have to face cameras and explain themselves. President Bush isn’t.
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