RUSH: All right, let’s see, you got audio sound bite 16 up there ready to go, Mike? Keep it standing by because it’s coming up soon. Mrs. Clinton beginning to moderate her position on this now, and I’ll tell you why. We’ll get started with the process with this phone call. Dave from Mission Viejo in California, hi.
CALLER: Mega dittos since 1989, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: Good. The reason I called, just want to let you know, Bill Clinton goes down to University of Dubai almost once a year, gives a speech, promote his books, makes millions of dollars, and then on his speech he says like what a great ally Dubai is —
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: — what a great country it is. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, God save us all from her, gets behind the blow horn and then contradicts her husband.
RUSH: All right, let’s put all this together. Dave, thanks for the call. Audio sound bite 16: this is from this morning in the Senate Armed Services Committee as they’re doing hearings, congressional hearings into the secret port deal. An unidentified reporter says, “Senator Clinton, after the hearing today, do you anticipate bipartisan legislation to block the consummation of this deal by March the 2nd?”
HILLARY: There will certainly be legislation to require the 45-day investigation. It seems to many of us that on the face of the statute, and given the circumstances of this transaction, that should have been undertaken, but in the absence of it, it should now be ordered. That may be the first step in trying to resolve this matter.
RUSH: Whoa! Resolve this matter? I wonder what she means when she says “resolve this matter.” You know what I think it means? I think it means, “All right. Let’s do the investigation and let’s find out how this deal got put together. Let’s do all the fact finding we can, and then we’ll approve it,” because what upsets a lot of people about this is the AP’s got this totally misleading story today about the Bush administration engaged in a “secret deal” with the government of United Arab Emirates, and this company or whatever. There is a government agency that does this. They’ve been doing it since 1988. They’ve investigated 1,500 such deals since then, and they’ve rejected one, and it was a deal owned by a questionable ChiCom concern out in California.
You know, a lot of people saying, ‘After 9/11, why is this process still taking place without anybody knowing about it? If this would have just been subject to public knowledge, if we’d have been told UAE wants to buy the six ports…’ Wait a minute! People still have the reaction they have. ‘That’s silly! That’s stupid! Why? Why sell to terrorists?’ But then the whole process is open, sun shining on it, and none of this would be taking place here. It wouldn’t have been sprung on anybody as a surprise. That’s probably what needs to change, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11. I distinctly hear Mrs. Clinton backing away, and I think she’ll hear from the longshoreman union this afternoon, backing away from blanket opposition to this. She doesn’t want to stop it now.
She wants the 45-day investigation. Now, let’s go back to the guy from Mission Viejo because I have here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers a copy of Arabian Business. Our research tentacles know no bounds, folks, and it’s published Sunday, December 4th, 2005, so it was just late last year. ‘Clinton Leads Dubai Praise — Former US president Bill Clinton praised Dubai’s leaders last week, telling them the way Islamic and Western values and cultures are being merged is ‘wonderful.’ Speaking via telecast at the Leaders in Dubai conference on Monday, Clinton was quick to highlight the work done by the emirate’s rulers, in particular Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and Minister of Defence of the United Arab Emirates. Clinton said: ‘Dubai is a role model of what could be achieved despite the other negative developments in the region.’ When I went to Dubai for the first time…’
And he talks about his reaction when he first went there and saw all this technological advancement. He had no idea what was going on in the Middle East. He had the same reaction I had. Now, Clinton also — let’s not forget. Back in 1998, the Clinton administration sold 60 F-16s to the United Arab Emirates. The United Arab Emirates funded a course on Muslim studies at Columbia University set up, endowed at $200,000. They have a lot of involvement in this country already. They’ve been able to infiltrate this country with terrorists easily. If they to fly one of they see F-16s and drop a bomb someplace… Well, they probably couldn’t penetrate our airspace. Well, you never know, Cessnas have gotten close to the White House.
The point is here that now you’ve got Clinton with his past, as president, big ally. He does make these speeches, collects money from Dubai, talks about them with great, great praise, and here’s Hillary, with her knee-jerk reaction earlier in the week. ‘We can’t do this! Why, this is crazy! Why, terrorism in our ports, why, we’ll not stand for it,’ because of course that’s what her constituents want to hear. She just can’t agree with Bush. I will guarantee you what happened is that I don’t know how often the Clintons see each other, and I don’t know how often they talk to one another, but I’ll guarantee you that somebody talked to somebody here.
Clinton got hold of Hillary said, (doing Clinton impression) ‘Hey, hey, babe. Can I remind you of some things here? You know how much money I’m making from — we talk about how rich we are. You know how much money I’m making from these people? These people are cool, they’re okay. I sent them jets. Don’t you remember that, we did that back in 1998? If you want to be consistent, if you don’t want people throwing mud at you because you’re being inconsistent, you’ve got to moderate your position on this, because it’s not a bad deal,’ blah, blah, blah.
I guarantee you that one of the reasons is that, because there has to be something, because the pull and the tug of unions on Democrats, folks, is tight. It’s almost a hangman’s noose and Hillary is moderating her position on this since the first of the week and in doing so she’s going to make angry the longshoremen’s union and other AFL-CIO unions that donate to her campaigns. So she’s walking a little bit of a tightrope here. I’m telling you that as people start looking at just the economics of the deal and ignore the politics of it, just look at the structure of the economics of the deal, there’s not much to find to have a problem with, which has been my dilemma all week. There just isn’t much to have a problem with here. All the problems are on the political side, and that’s where she appears to be moderating her tone a little bit at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings today. Mary in Madison, New Jersey, nice to have you on the program.
CALLER: Hi, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: It’s wonderful listening to you, the king of radio and of logic.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I’m on your side on this, and I wonder why there’s so few of us, but it seems to me that if we trust President Bush to wage war on terrorism and to make all these significant decisions, decisions from day to day, how can we dispute what seems to me like a trivial trade deal?
RUSH: Well, I wouldn’t say it’s trivial, but —
CALLER: Compared to where we land our planes. Yeah, we can swim the channel practically from Dubai to Iran. I mean, they’re a strategic partner.
RUSH: Look, our Navy — our own Navy — uses the ports in Dubai to restock, to refuel. It’s where they most like and feel safest. They most like to go and they feel safest. The security there is great. This is all absurd. But you ask a good question, because I’ll take 
you back to Harriet Miers. And I remember all of you wanted to trust President Bush on Harriet Miers and I was opposed to Harriet Miers and you would call here and say, ‘I trust George Bush.’ And that wasn’t enough for me — and, it’s not enough for me now. But let me expand on this, put it all in context. George W. Bush as president has done some things in certain areas that has dissatisfied and perhaps even angered a lot of conservatives over the years: the education bill with Ted Kennedy; the reaching out to Democrats and trying to be friends with them rather than being loyal to his own friends, the spending, of lack of attention to immigration.
There have been a lot of things, but what has caused all of these conservatives to stay aligned with Bush is his steadfastness on the war on terror and the fact that the Democratic Party is not a partner in our national security. If you wanted to invest in the security of the country after 9/11, you had to support George W. Bush because there was nobody else out there at high levels of government in the Democratic Party willing to do so. They wanted to tear him down. They were making it impossible to wage war against this enemy. Every prison was a torture chamber. No domestic spying! No intelligence-gathering. No interrogations! No nothing. They were making Bush out to be the biggest threat. They were accusing Bush of causing terrorism.
We all know how ridiculous that is. In the process, the Democrats are making it plain they can’t be trusted. So we hung with George W. Bush because of that particular issue. That issue galvanized and kept us all linked, properly so. But I do not support this deal because I trust George W. Bush. I’m not saying I don’t trust him, but it’s not trust. It’s a matter of logic to me. Here is a man who has for four years been alone at the top — other than members of his administration — but he’s been alone at the top in keeping this country focused on measures to guarantee as best we can our security. What I can’t believe is that one day after this four-year track record, George W. Bush could lose his sanity, could lose his resolve, could change his mind, and willingly participate in a deal that would undo practically every step he’s taken to guarantee as best he can our security.
It’s not a matter of trust; it’s a matter of logic. I just don’t think he’s stupid, and I don’t think that he’s not paying attention, and I don’t think that he is all of a sudden less concerned about the threats that we face. If anything, I think this represents an understanding that the threat is real, and it’s very consistent with his foreign policy. He’s trying to spread democracy to the Middle East, everybody laughing at him. He’s trying to make people around the world who are living in tyranny and in oppression free, and the world is laughing at him. So here we have a modernized little country in the Middle East, the United Arab Emirates. They want to be like us. It’s apparent to me. It’s obvious that’s who their role model is. Their role model is not bin Laden. They’re role model is not a bunch of sheiks and imams and mosques that want to take us back to the Twelfth Century.
Their role model is us. So it’s an ally in the region. Economic interdependence makes them far less likely to ever be an enemy, and far more likely to join us in the security efforts in this port deal and anywhere else around the world. To ensure their investment and to ensure our safety, we become partners in this — and I think it actually fits with Bush’s foreign policy in terms of modernization, freedom for individuals, economic opportunity and advancement. I think it’s totally consistent. Once against, it’s the Democrats who are on the wrong side of it. I want to stress this, because trust wasn’t enough to make me support Harriet Miers just because he nominated her.
I thought that was an absolute mistake, and if I thought this was a mistake I would tell you the same thing. You have to know that, if nothing else about me, over the last 18 years. This is not a matter of trust. I have researched. You’ve listened to the program all week. I have done the “due diligence,” as they say. I have looked at the details on the economic side of this. I know it’s a time bomb politically. But that time bomb, the fuse is not lit on it yet, and Mrs. Clinton’s sound bite just illustrated that. The fuse on the time bomb is not lit — and I want to just predict to you that you are going to see more and more hedging back ever so slowly and slightly from the knee-jerk position that many people took earlier in the week. Mark my words. A quick time-out. It’s a great call. See, that is an example of great call. The purpose of a caller is to make the host look good, and that woman did it.
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