RUSH: Anyway, folks, great to be with you, you have lots on the plate today, a veritable buffet, a smorgasbord, if you will. We just had a brilliantly, hugely successful military operation in Najaf. We wiped out hundreds of terrorist insurgents. We blew up a plot by Shi’ites to kill leading Shi’ite clerics, including the grand ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. In fact, the Shi’ite group that was going to do this were going to use kids and others, and they were going to disguise themselves as pilgrims on the way somewhere and they’re going to wipe out all these clerics. We blew it up and we stopped it and we wiped out hundreds of these bad guys. It’s a huge story about cooperation with the Iraqi military and the security forces, it was a great victory. Would you like to hear the New York Times headline? “Missteps by Iraqi Forces in Battle Raise Questions.” (Laughing.) Folks, trust me when I tell you these people are invested in defeat. It was something like 250 to 400 bad guys killed, and we get this headline: ?Missteps by Iraqi Forces in Najaf Battle Raise Questions?? They can’t afford success in the Middle East. In fact, let me amend that. They can’t survive.
The left in this country, the media, the Drive-By Media, the Democrat Party, they can’t survive, ladies and gentlemen, if we win this in Iraq. They cannot permit it. It’s not that they will not allow it, they can’t survive it. It’s not about belief anymore, this is about political business. The Times even had to begrudgingly admit here, ?Well, the Iraqis and Americans eventually prevailed in the battle, but the Iraqi security force’s miscalculations about the group’s strength and intentions raised troubling questions about their ability to recognize and deal with a threat.? Well, let me ask you, New York Times — who wrote this? Marc Santora. Mr. Santora, how are the Iraqis supposed to learn this? Off the Internet? Is there some manual on dealing with Shi’ite insurgents that they can consult? No, it’s like anybody else learning to do something, including you learning to write bogus stories, you have to do it. If only the Iraqis were as wise and clairvoyant as the reporters at the New York Times, why, you realize the greatness that they could achieve?