Ellen Tauscher Smacked Down by C-SPAN Caller

RUSH: C-SPAN this morning, Ellen Tauscher, a Democrat, she’s a member of the House Armed Services Committee, and she’s talking about missile defense, Star Wars, Strategic Defense Initiative. Now, I don’t have to tell you people that ever since Ronaldus Magnus proposed the program, the only people who have really opposed it are Democrats. They opposed it on the basis that it would unnecessarily accelerate the arms race, that it would cause the Soviets to try to create their own, and Reagan said (paraphrasing) “Hey, that’s great, you know what, we might even share it with them. If we can do it, we’ll share it with them. What better way to defend against these things than to render them impossible to use?” (Democrat impression) “Oh, we’re still against it, too much defense spending, social programs will suffer.” The Democrats have never supported it. You might find two or three now and then, but as a party, they have never, ever been for this. So I hear about Ellen Tauscher on C-SPAN today, and I am stunned. Here’s what she said.
TAUSCHER: We also need a safety net for the American people, and that is a missile defense system that works, not one that’s just deployed, but one that’s operational. People know that we have deployed a missile defense system. I supported that, but not one that works, and, you know, we need to have a Congress that’s going to hold the administration accountable, not allow it to pull the missile defense system out of the normal testing regime and not one that is an embarrassment right now that we know can’t work.
RUSH: Holy! It’s worse than I thought! It’s worse than I thought. So now they’re saying they can do it smarter! (Laughing) They can do a missile defense system smarter, and it’s Congress that can do it. Well, this prompted a viewer watching C-SPAN to call, and the call was from New York, and here’s how that exchange went.
CALLER: I’m in shock about what the representative is saying. You’re talking about a missile defense system when 90% of the liberals, Democrats in Congress, the Senate voted it down —
TAUSCHER: Not true. Not true. Not true.
CALLER: — and now you’re talking, now you’re the Clinton apologist on North Korea. He needs a legacy. You Democrats are just helping him to get it. Hillary was out yesterday, she was totally shot down by John McCain, who over two years worked on the North Korean deal with Bill, and Bill, of course, being the coward that he was, did nothing, and now he’s back again trying to do the same thing with Hillary, letting her be the mouthpiece —
TAUSCHER: Look, look, if this — if this is —
CALLER: — 5,000 people died, how — how insane are you, Ms. Tauscher?
TAUSCHER: I take my medication on time, and I would suggest that you start drinking decaf.

RUSH: Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho! Folks, you know, when you hear things or hear about things like this, you have to realize that these people are not skunking the whole country anymore like they used to. I mean, maybe the first call after she talks about the fact that Democrats support a missile defense system, but why say it now? This is the thing. You had Foley on the front page, he was on the front page for a while, then it’s Hastert and the whole Republican leadership, and then everything changed when Kim Jong Il claims to have successfully tested a nuke, and the Democrats, what does this tell you about their polling? This tells you that national security, their internal polling has to be huge. It has to be big, and their polling has to be telling them they’re not showing up so well on that subject.
So they send out Ellen Tauscher, who is on the Armed Services Committee, to start spreading the myth that Democrats have always been for a missile defense system. “Yeah, we just want to do one that’s smarter. We want to be smarter and do one that’s better,” and so not have this silly one that’s constantly in test mode that doesn’t work. Now, this, to me, ladies and gentlemen, is indicative of quite a few things, but the most important thing it indicates to me is that this election, Democrats know it, is going to be about issues. It’s going to be about things that matter to people, real things that matter in their real lives. Liberals even said, by the way, it would be impossible to build any missile defense system that worked. They’re always the ones that pooh-pooh these grand ideas. If you listen to them, nothing’s possible, nothing will ever work. At any rate, this is going to be an election about issues. Democrats and liberals are scared. They lose when elections are about issues.
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RUSH: Just a couple pf things here from the UK Guardian, Tuesday September 11th, 2001. Nobody will remember this because this was in the newspapers the day of the 9/11 attack. “Democrats Lash Bush Lunacy on Missiles — The Senate’s most powerful voice on foreign affairs, Joe Biden yesterday,” that would have been September 10th of 2001, “denounced President George Bush’s defense policies as ‘absolute lunacy’ that threatened to pull the trigger on a new arms race. In the most blistering Democrat attack to date on the planned missile defense system, Biden, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, poured scorn on the scheme which he said would starve other military programs of cash and make the world a more perilous place.
“Senator Biden’s remarks expected to mark the start of a concerted campaign reflecting the Democrats’ belief that Mr. Bush is politically vulnerable on foreign and defense policy, which has been characterized by unilateralist approach and a belief ridiculed by Biden as theological in building a missile defense system against possible attacks from rogue states.” This story ran the morning of September 11th, 2001, so it faded into the ether, but we did a little research on it, just key word search, bammo. So Ms. Tauscher, if you want to go out there and try to make the claim that Democrats are all for a missile defense, it’s not possible to make that claim and back it up.
You may be able to find a couple Democrats who said some good things about a missile defense system, maybe even voted for one, but as party policy they have been opposed to it ever since they first heard about it, just as they’re opposed most new weapons systems, using the same argument. “Well, this is going to starve us of needed cash for needed programs in other segments of our society.” From the United States Senate Republican Policy Committee, their website from June 26th of 2002: “Why do Democrats oppose the president’s missile defense funding request? It’s not the cost (PDF). Democrats continue to oppose efforts to improve our national defense, arguing that certain programs are too expensive and don’t represent responsible government spending. Yet their opposition based on the program’s price tag evaporates when voting on non-defense issues.”
They’re opposed to it institutionally. They always have, they’re liberals. You know, with the Cold War having ended, the intense focus on Democrats’ foreign policy and defense industry views has sort of the faded to the back page, other than when they surface their overall cut-and-run strategy when it comes to the war on terror and the war in Iraq, which, by the way, Bush nailed ’em on again today in his press conference. He got questions from the media: “You keep saying that Democrats are ‘cut-and-run.’ I’ve never heard them use those words,” and president said, “Well, I know that my vocabulary may not be up to snuff, as much as others, but when I hear people say, ‘set a date certain for withdrawal,’ that, to me, is cut-and-run. It means you’re leaving before the mission is over. That means cut-and-run.” Bam, bam, bam. Right back at them.
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RUSH: Our first caller today is Michael from Kingston, New York, who happens to be the caller who had the shoot-out today with Ellen Tauscher on C-SPAN. Michael, welcome to the program. Nice to have you with us, sir.
CALLER: Thank you, Mr. Limbaugh. It’s my pleasure and —
RUSH: Now, before you get to your point, for people just joining us now, I want to play your call —
CALLER: Certainly.
RUSH: — so people can hear you talking to Ellen Tauscher.
CALLER: Thank you.
RUSH: She has just said that Democrats are for missile defense. Michael was watching and couldn’t believe it. He called in, got on. This was his exchange with Congresswoman Tauscher.
MICHAEL ON C-SPAN: I’m in shock about what the representative is saying. You’re talking about a missile defense system when 90% of the liberals, Democrats in Congress, the Senate voted it down —
TAUSCHER: Not true. Not true. Not true.
MICHAEL ON C-SPAN: — and now you’re talking, now you’re the Clinton apologist on North Korea. He needs a legacy. You Democrats are just helping him to get it. Hillary was out yesterday, she was totally shot down by John McCain, who over two years worked on the North Korean deal with Bill, and Bill, of course, being the coward that he was, did nothing, and now he’s back again trying to do the same thing with Hillary, letting her be the mouthpiece —
TAUSCHER: Look, look, if this — if this is —
MICHAEL ON C-SPAN: — 5,000 people died, how — how insane are you, Ms. Tauscher?
TAUSCHER: I take my medication on time, and I would suggest that you start drinking decaf.
RUSH: Michael, congratulations.
CALLER: Thank you.
RUSH: That was a fabulous, fabulous, fabulous call. Welcome to the program here.
CALLER: Thank you very much. I was just totally blown away. I told the gentleman that answered the phone because I wanted to make a comment also about being a Vietnam veteran that served 358 days, not 42 minutes like John Kerry did in Vietnam, which started me off, and then I heard Howard Dean, oh he’s saying that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and the president “never really served.” Well, Howard Dean never served, and Bill Clinton never served, but he seems, they fail to mention what they don’t need to mention — and as far as the legacy goes, that’s what just kills me. Every day I’m hearing Democrat after Democrat, liberal after liberal say the same thing: Bill Clinton never did anything wrong.

Well, it’s hypocrisy. For eight years, the man did nothing but zipper diplomacy, hid. We don’t know where he is, his wife tried to do things, she was a total loser. And now I’m in New York stuck with another Clinton. We are 230,000 jobs lost in upstate New York where I live. Hillary came here and promised us the world. We’re going to get factories, we’re going to get jobs. Well, now we have 360,000 jobs. We lost another 130,000 jobs under her watch. And yet the people up here, I don’t know what their problem is. But everything is geared to, like you say, that war room mentality. Clinton is out there, Lanny Davis, Carville, The Forehead. They’re all out there trying to build a legacy, and the funniest thing to me is, he doesn’t have a legacy after eight years.
Now it’s six years later, he still doesn’t have a legacy, he has nothing to run on, nothing to do — and my greatest fear is that Satan, his wife, will try and get him a legacy. She’s not going to run the country. She’s going to look after her so-called man, and when I heard Tauscher start with the Star Wars and defending the country, that’s the last thing a liberal wants to do. But they so feel that they’re going to win next month that they’re all saying not if we win, it’s when we win, that we’re going to do this and we’re going to do that. It’s all the ideas that Reagan had, the greatest president, George Bush, one of the greatest presidents to be. Clinton never had an idea! What are you doing? What?
RUSH: Well, now, wait. Wait a minute. That’s unfair. That’s unfair. Now, wait a second. We know that Clinton gave us detailed plans to get bin Laden, and Sandy Burglar is out on television saying he remembers every detail about the North Korea deal, and Bush is the one that screwed it up. We’ve got Burglar’s sound bites.
CALLER: I heard him the other day, and he was absolutely ridiculous.
RUSH: Let me ask you a quick question, because time is dwindling. Can you think — how old are?
CALLER: I’m going to be 62.
RUSH: Okay, you’re 62. Can you remember in your lifetime at any point the media being be assessed with any ex-president’s legacy? I don’t remember the media being concerned —
CALLER: No, no.
RUSH: — Reagan’s, even JFK’s or LBJ’s or with Jimmy Carter’s or with Bush 41 or Gerald Ford. All of a sudden now we’re obsessed with the Clinton legacy. Do you know why that is?
CALLER: Yes. Because he has information, what do you call it, the bones in the closet, the skeletons, and this man is such a monster, and she is so dirt evil, that they’ll use it against these people. All it is, is a bribe and a payoff with these people, and I’m just waiting to find out that Clinton legacy will be the zipper diplomacy. But you know that the media is going to go way beyond that, Mr. Limbaugh.
RUSH: Well, I do, but —
CALLER: Try.
RUSH: Well, they’re never going to give up because, for this reason: Clinton’s legacy is theirs. The media that we’re discussing are all from the same generation. There is a generational tie to these people age-wise, culturally, educationally. Clinton’s legacy is theirs. And that’s why they are obsessed with it. Because if Clinton is allowed to fail and be portrayed as a loser or didn’t do anything as you say, it doesn’t reflect on the man they’re trying to create as the most important Democrat president perhaps last century, second only (and it’s a close race) to FDR. Well, it was great hearing you on C-SPAN, but I have to tell you, you’re even better here. (Laughing) It’s great to have you on the program Michael. Thank you so much.

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