RUSH: Gentry in Atlanta, you’re next on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Rush, good day.
RUSH: Hey.
CALLER: How are you?
RUSH: Good.
CALLER: Getting any respect today?
RUSH: Am I getting respect? I get respect constantly, respect myself.
CALLER: Well, bless your heart.
RUSH: Thank you. Thank you, sir.
CALLER: You read that —
RUSH: We must love ourselves before others may love us as well.
CALLER: True, and —
RUSH: And I have no problem loving myself.
CALLER: You make that self-evident.
RUSH: Well, I’m confident, too. So it’s all part of the package.
CALLER: You are. And no one can make you feel inferior without your permission.
RUSH: Well, no, there’s some that try —
CALLER: Well, who said that?
RUSH: — and I haven’t given them their permission to do it, but they try. They don’t succeed, but people that strut their superiority are actually quite insecure and in a state of panic.
CALLER: I can’t believe you just said that.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: Have you read the op-ed by Liz Cheney in the Washington Post today?
RUSH: No, I heard about that. I haven’t read it.
CALLER: You should read that because I just cannot believe she’s even — I tell you what, it could be a great day for conservatism in America, because she said that the retreat is not an option, failure is not an option, and by God I think that she’s probably down there enlisting at the Army’s recruitment office right now.
RUSH: What’s your problem with that?
CALLER: With her enlisting?
RUSH: No, that defeat is not an option, that retreat is not an option, what’s wrong with that?
CALLER: Well, if you read the article, she doesn’t even mention the civil war or the religious war that’s going on in Iraq right now —
RUSH: I’ll tell you what, can you hang on? I got a break here. We’ll continue this after.
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RUSH: We now rejoin our conversation with Gentry in Atlanta. During the break, Gentry, I went and printed out the column in the Washington Post by Liz Cheney. Now, what is it specifically in this piece that you’re commenting on that you find incredulous.
CALLER: Well, the fact that she says that we’re in an existential war. I don’t have the article in front of me. I read it online.
RUSH: Okay, it says, ?We are at war. America faces an existential threat. It is not, as Pelosi has claimed, a situation to be solved. It would be nice if we could wake up tomorrow and say, as Senator Barack Obama suggested, that enough is enough, but wishing doesn’t make it so. We will have to fight these terrorists to the death somewhere.?
CALLER: If this is such a war of such magnitude.
RUSH: Yes?
CALLER: Why has the administration not called for a draft or a greater sacrifice other than, as the president said the other night on TV when he was interviewed by Jim Lehrer, when he said, ?You know, the fact that people see the carnage of the war on TV, and that’s how they sacrifice, they sacrifice peace of mind.? I mean, it’s incredulous that Dick Cheney would send his daughter out to make his case for continuing this failed war —
RUSH: I don’t know that that’s what happened. It may have, but Ms. Cheney herself is a former principal deputy assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs —
CALLER: And what qualified her to get that job?
RUSH: Well, I have no clue, but I’m also not going to assume she’s unqualified. What qualifies Barack Obama? What qualifies Hillary Clinton to comment on any of this? What is the point here? You’re talking about sacrifice. Do you know the makeup of the country today? One of the biggest problems with this is that we don’t have to. The country is so affluent, we have a volunteer force that people don’t have to sacrifice if they don’t choose it. That?s what?s so remarkable about the Armed Forces Gentry.
CALLER: You just downgraded the threat of terrorism to this country.
RUSH: I did?
CALLER: Yes, by saying that the country doesn’t have a stake in fighting terrorism.
RUSH: I didn’t say that at all.
CALLER: — just going about our lives.
RUSH: I didn’t say that. Let me try it again.
CALLER: You just said that we don’t have sacrifice, this war can be fought with a volunteer army and go about your lives, spend your money, and, you know, get back to wonder and fulfillment. It’s all lollipops and rainbows.
RUSH: Yeah, this is not like it was in World War II. The country doesn’t have to ration. Rosie the Riveter doesn’t have to rivet. We don’t have to send all the women into the automobile plants to start making airplanes. We don’t have to do that. We are the most prosperous, affluent country on the face of the earth, and if Paris Hilton wants to get drunk every night in South Beach or Hollywood, she can. We’ve got plenty of people her age that volunteer to defend the country. I don’t see anything wrong with this. I keep hearing this, ?Where’s the sacrifice? Where’s the sacrifice?? What kind of sacrifice do you want to see, besides tax increase?
CALLER: Well, if this is such an existential war, I want to see the country get on a footing that eliminates terrorism where terrorism exists from the people that perpetuated it on us on 9/11.
RUSH: The best way for the people of the country to get on board is for the Democratic Party to join the rest of the country in defending the country. How about a resolution urging defeat of the bad guys? Why can’t they do that? 
CALLER: The bad guys are bin Laden.
RUSH: Well, he’s one of them. The bad guys are all over the place. 9/11, 20 years of terrorists acts against Americans prior to 9/11, the World Trade Center explosion in 1993, what do you mean? You don’t buy that it’s an existential war, you don’t buy that we have worldwide enemies out there?
CALLER: And we went after the people that committed the crime on 9/11 — or forgive me — on the first world trade bombings in ’93.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: Sheik Abdul Rahman is in jail.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: And, you know, here’s the thing, though. You and I will never agree on whether Iraq was behind 9/11 or not, but the bottom line —
RUSH: Yes, we will. I will agree with you that it wasn’t. Nobody ever said that it was.
CALLER: In every breath the president took he said 9/11 and then the next words out of his mouth were Iraq, Saddam Hussein.
RUSH: Come on now, if we’re going to discuss this, see, I am being honest with you. The president’s never said that. That’s why people are so bent out of shape, some of them, we’ve gone into Iraq.
CALLER: Can I make one more point?
RUSH: There was no operational linkage. But I think it is really odd for people to believe that terrorists are in Egypt, they’re in Dubai, they’re in Iran —
CALLER: Saudi Arabia.
RUSH: Saudi Arabia. But, you know, they just never found their way into Iraq. There was never an Al-Qaeda — terrorists are everywhere but Iraq.
CALLER: I got one more bone to pick with you on this article. The fact that she blames Hillary Clinton for the impending defeat in Iraq. She goes on to say about her remarkable trajectory, something to that effect, about what it takes to win the presidency, she would, you know, put as many effort into winning the war in Iraq. And it seems to me that that’s just an attack on Hillary, and she’s leaving it up to the next president, whoever that person may be, to clean this mess up.
RUSH: No. We can clean the mess up if half the country and the Democrats would get on board with it, support victory. It really isn’t that complicated. Now, you know better than this, to start dumping here on Liz Cheney for criticizing Hillary. Hillary Clinton and her husband tried to blame me for the Oklahoma City bombing. It happens. This is what happens when you’re in public life when you take a position on things. I think it’s a rather good point. I wish the Democrats, if they would just expend half the energy in defending the country and defeating this enemy as they are in trying to rid this country of George W. Bush, I would embrace them with open arms.
CALLER: But Rush —
RUSH: They clearly have the stomach for a fight. Not just to defend the country. They will fight with all they’ve got to gain power, but when it comes to defending the country, it’s —
CALLER: That’s so disingenuous. That’s like saying that if China attacked the United States on 9/11, that we went and attacked Thailand as retribution for it, because they’re Asians. That doesn’t make sense. We should never have gone into Iraq.
RUSH: Oh, gosh, this is why we’re losing the country. The reasons we went into Iraq are as documented as Bill Clinton laid them out in 1998, and every Democrat in the Senate supported him.
CALLER: No, every Democrat did not support it. [sic]
RUSH: (The Senate passed it unanimously) Clinton didn’t follow through on it. But everything that George W. Bush said about weapons of mass destruction, and the threat posed by Saddam and his desire to secure nuclear weapons, Bill Clinton said it in ’98. The press dutily reported it. Why we went into Iraq is crystal clear. It’s not because of 9/11. 9/11 is relevant in this sense —
CALLER: Then why is the country so disillusioned with the war?
RUSH: Because we’re not winning, because they don’t see pictures of us kicking the enemy’s ass. All they see is IEDs and Americans being reported killed, but they don’t see us winning. The media is not presenting a picture of US victory, and there has to be some. You know, it’s a one-sided presentation for the most part of what happens. Now, I’m going to explain to you the relevance of 9/11 to Iraq. You’re president of the United States, we’ve just been hit on 9/11, and it’s worse than Pearl Harbor, and there are threats of more such acts. We’ve got 14 failed resolutions of the UN Security Council for Saddam Hussein to let weapons inspectors in there to make sure that he’s not building chemical, biological, and other weapons of mass destruction. He’s flaunting his nose.
We know that bin Laden and other Al-Qaedas had been given safe haven in Iraq in the nineties. It’s called preemption. It would have been irresponsible to not take action based on what every intelligence service in the world said and what we knew of Saddam’s previous use of chemical weapons on his own people. It’s a different day after 9/11, sad to say some people can’t come to grips with this. You just can’t put your head in the sand and say, you know, this 9/11 is just an episode, and we’re going to have to learn to live with these things because there’s nothing we can do to stop it. If that’s the attitude, then we’re going to have more and more and more of them. Now the downfall of all this is we face the same situation in Iran. And, by the way, this scenario is starting to get awfully familiar. Iran’s refusing to let UN inspectors in. Why, where have I heard this before? Iran won’t let 30 US nuclear inspectors in to see what’s going on.
This little Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, you must think he’s kidding when he threatens to end Israel’s existence and then come after us. You must think he’s kidding, he’s being a blowhard. But people in positions of responsibility who have a constitutional duty to protect the country can’t pretend he’s joking. They can’t pretend that Saddam Hussein was a blowhard. It’s their job. So that’s why we went to Iraq while we were in Afghanistan. We didn’t find any weapons of mass destruction. Oops. Big problem. But we knew they were there. Still don’t know what happened to them, but they were there. The sad thing about talking to you, Gentry, is you sound like a smart guy it, a little smug, but you sound like a smart guy, and you know everything that I just told you. Well, maybe you don’t, depends on what news you listen to.
There’s no hope that we’re going to achieve victory over this enemy when half the country is being led by a party which is trying to secure our defeat, for the sole purpose of winning their own power back and defeating and humiliating George W. Bush. Where’s the resolution for victory? Where’s the resolution to defeat these guys? You going to dump on Liz Cheney because she writes something critical of Hillary Rodham? What, is Hillary untouchable now?
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