Bush Strategery Puts Pelosi on the Spot

RUSH: Of all the things that are reverberating out there in the political cauldron, all the things that are boiling and effervescing out there, what’s the one thing George W. Bush cares about and is going to fight for? There may be two, but the one biggie is Iraq. Now, during the break I went back there and I was talking to Snerdley, and I said, ?Snerdley, this is a rhetorical question, how long is it going to be before the Republicans start ripping into Pelosi like the Democrats ripped into Newt?? My thinking was, it ain’t going to happen because she’s a girl, and you don’t hit the girl. You don’t hit the girl. Plus, it’s not who the Republicans are. Despite what the Democrats think, you know, we did hit Clinton, but that was for reasons oriented around policy, and then the lying and all that sort of stuff. That was really born of our incredulity that the American people could fall for it, for somebody like Clinton. That’s when I should have recognized what a passive bunch of wimps live in this country.
Nevertheless, Bush is actually doing something from a political standpoint pretty smart. I think he knows that he’s not going to hit Pelosi, and one of the reasons the Republicans might not hit Pelosi is because he’s not going to do it. But if you take a look, Harriet Miers, the White House counsel, she’s gone, and she was largely responsible for selecting judicial nominees. A number of holdover nominees for various appellate court seats, district court judge seats, have withdrawn themselves or Bush has swept them aside. What he’s basically done here — look at minimum wage. The minimum wage. It’s going to happen, although it may not. There’s something interesting going on with the minimum wage. The House has passed it; it’s going to go to the Senate, and in the Senate, there’s some Democrats that agree with Republicans that we’ve gotta put some tax cuts in here and regulatory relief for small business.
Well, if that happens in the Senate, and if they pass their version of it with those provisions, then you go to a conference committee with the House, and that’s not going to sit well with the House Democrats, they don’t want any tax cuts for big business, small business, or whoever. So it will be interesting to see what happens in that conference. I don’t see how the Democrats in the House could vote against it even though it has those tax cuts in it since they’re the ones that sponsored it. The president’s going to sign it regardless what’s in it. So that’s off the table. What’s going to happen here, let me shorten the theory, the only thing left on the table to argue about at the end of this first hundred hours of legislation of the Democrats will be Iraq, maybe stem cells, because the president will veto that. They might have the votes in the Senate to override his veto, but I don’t think they do in the House. But all this other stuff that they want in their agenda, if it flies through the House and the Senate and so forth, he’s not going to put up a fight about it.
He’s going to continue to fight on Iraq, and the Democrats, I don’t care that they run the House, I don’t care that they run the Senate, they are not going to be able to de-fund it. They may be able to investigate it, and they may be able to conduct hearings, and they may be able to spread their propaganda and create as much anti-war sentiment in the country, but they are not going to be able to stop it. They’re not going to be able to stop the war in Iraq, and then the focus of attention is going to hit Pelosi, and to a lesser extent, Dingy Harry, from Democrats who are going to say, ?What are you good for?? The whole point of you being there is to get us out of Iraq. They’re not going to start dancing in the streets over the minimum wage being passed, the increase, and they’re not going to go nuts over the government getting involved in negotiating drug prices. That’s going to be abomination if it happens, but the Democrat constituency, this kook fringe base is not going to go crazy throwing parties over these legislative agenda items in their so-called first 100 hours.
Bush isn’t going to argue with them, and the Republicans are not sitting there really arguing. In fact, they’re going to vote for the minimum wage. The interesting action there will be in the Senate. But on the thing that really matters, the war in Iraq, the substantive part of it that matters, stopping it, getting us out of there, they aren’t going to be able to do a thing about it. At that point then there’s going to be some focus of attention on Pelosi and her ineffectiveness and question marks about what she’s able to really accomplish and so forth, and those questions of course will come from Democrats who have invested such high hopes in Pelosi’s ability along with Dingy Harry and Ted Kennedy and all the rest to get us out of Iraq. So Bush has got two years left, and the thing that he cares more about is Iraq, and he’s perfectly willing to argue about that on something they can’t win. I mean substantive. They can continue their little propaganda ploys with their hearings and gin up anti-war support, and they can continue to pound Bush and make him look — but after six years, Bush is not going to cave to it. And at this point he doesn’t care.
He does care about victory. He cares about winning. He cares about a policy and a strategy that’s going to lead to an overall wider victory in the war on terror. He understands this, he’s committed to it, and there’s nothing they can do to sidetrack him from it, short of impeaching him. They’re not going to do that, either, because they don’t have the votes for that. Their majorities are too slim. That’s just not going to happen. So when all this shakes out — and it won’t be long this year for all this stuff to shake out — the genuine ineffectiveness on the thing that matters most to the anti-war wing of the Democrat Party, which is the big wing of the Democrat Party, she will not be able to have gotten done. So keep a sharp eye. See if I’m not right about that.