Nixon, Bush, Rudy and Conservatism

RUSH: Rudy Giuliani was on Larry King Alive last night. I don’t know how many of you people watch this, but the reputation that Larry King Alive has is that it’s softball after softball after softball after softball — and it’s true with the aging Hollywood star who hasn’t had a hit in 30 years but still is a big favorite of Larry’s as a guest, or some liberal Hollywood entertainer or what have you, or somebody from the Drive-By Media. Yes, they get softballs. But you get a guy who’s a Republican, a quasi-conservative, and Larry’s softballs become not so soft. First question from King (Larry impression): “You don’t like the idea of a nonbinding resolution, because?”
GIULIANI: Because there’s no decision!
KING: But it’s say — make a — It’s a statement.
GIULIANI: Yeah, but that’s what you do. That’s what Tim Russert does. That’s what Rush Limbaugh does. That’s what you guys do: you make comments. We pay them to make decisions, not just to make comments. We pay them to decide! The ones that I think have a better understanding of what their responsibility is, and are willing to take a risk are the ones who are saying, “We’ve got to hold back the funds. We’ve gotta vote against the war,” or, “We’re for the war.”
RUSH: What he’s saying — and I think it’s a wise comment — is it doesn’t take any guts to come up with a nonbinding resolution, and that’s not what these people are there to do: make statements and pontificate. They’re there to make laws, or not make laws, which would probably be the better course of action, but nevertheless, they still are pontificating. I want to elaborate on this a little more, though, because I think some of us might be underselling and underplaying this nonbinding resolution. I might have been guilty of that myself, because it’s easy to say the nonbinding resolution is a gutless move and that it will have no impact and that they’re going to have to do something serious like de-fund in order for this to matter. But, if they keep this up, and of course they’re going to be aided and abetted by a cavalry of Drive-By Media, it is going to continue to politically isolate the president, as it did Nixon.

I don’t know how many of you people will remember this. I read a review today in the New York Post by a TV critic, Linda Stasi, and she was heralding a History Channel show on Nixon, and she was inadvertently informing us how ignorant she is on politics, because she was telling us (paraphrased), “You know, my gosh! This Nixon guy, he wasn’t all that bad. He was a pretty big liberal. Why, this Nixon guy couldn’t be elected today. He couldn’t be. This Nixon guy couldn’t get the Republican nomination for president today. Why, this Nixon guy, this Nixon guy created the EPA! The liberals love that. This Nixon guy went out there and created OSHA,” and I could tell she was stunned. She thinks this is a brilliant program on Nixon. It’s on the History Channel tonight (it’s not a Biography), and of course it’s gotta talk about Watergate and goes through the whole mess here. But the point is that I said a long time ago the Bush presidency reminds me a lot of the Nixon presidency more than the Reagan presidency because President Bush has “reached out” to his enemies, the left, just as Nixon did.
Nixon gave them wage and price controls, and Bush has given them the right to write education bills with Ted Kennedy and so forth. We had steel tariffs. The president put steel tariffs on. We’ve had the drug bill. We’ve had a number of appeasements made by President Bush to the left to “bridge the gap,” “new tone” and so forth. Nixon did the same thing, Nixon was out there with OSHA and the EPA and wage and price controls and a whole bunch of other things. Affirmative action? Thank you, President Nixon — and of course the left so despises Nixon that they have forgotten what a good guy for them he was. So when this TV critic watches this preview special of Nixon, she thought, “Why, this is one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen!” because it’s stuff about Nixon she didn’t even know, or if she knew she didn’t remember, or is not old enough to know. I don’t know. But, point here is that the similarities between the Nixon presidency and the Bush presidency are eerie.
Now, I’m not talking about break-ins or any of that, but just the isolation, the isolation of the president from Congress; members of his own party abandoning him, as Nixon’s congressmen and senators did during Watergate and so forth. The Drive-Bys on the left have pretty much made the war in Iraq Watergate, not Vietnam. They’re claiming we’ve got another Vietnam, but the way to look at this is that they’re actually using the war in Iraq as Watergate. There’s no break-in. There’s none of this. But there is “presidential irresponsibility. He’s not listening to anybody! He’s isolated! He’s not listening to the people. He’s lost his mind. We’re trying to get the troops home. We’re trying to save the troops,” and so these resolutions of a nonbinding nature may not be binding, but if they keep up, they will have the effect of isolating Bush from even his political base — and, believe me, these resolutions are going to keep coming. You put blood in the water for the libs, and they’re like sharks: they keep smelling it and they’re going to keep sniffing it. Now, next question from King to Rudy, “Do you blame Rumsfeld for the war?”
GIULIANI: Noooo —

KING: But he —
GIULIANI: — I don’t blame anybody.
KING: You don’t blame anybody! Somebody’s got…?
GIULIANI: No, no. You don’t do it that way. That’s why you don’t make progress. Just like I don’t blame people for not figuring out September 11 before it happened. What I do is, I kind of look at what happened, so you learn for the future.
KING: But there were mistakes!
GIULIANI: Of course there were mistakes. Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes. The Battle of the Bulge was the biggest intelligence failure in American military history, much bigger than any in Vietnam or now. We didn’t know that the Soviets were moving three, four, 500,000 troops. We missed it.
RUSH: “We missed it,” and King says: The Battle of the Bulge? What was the Battle of the Bulge? That was, uh, uh… Wha? What was that?
You got a little flavor there of old Lar’. (impression) “Well, if there were mistakes made, somebody’s gotta get the guillotine!” But, of course, Rudy has it right: Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes; many more and profound mistakes have been made than in this war, which is really a penny-ante war compared to all these that were cited here: the Civil War, World War I, World War II. This is a penny-ante war. The way it’s being thrust on everybody here, it’s sickening to me, and it’s frustrating as all get out. But one other thing before we go to break here. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story yesterday. I think it posted in the middle of the afternoon, right after I got off the air, in fact, is when I saw the story.

“Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, insisting he is ‘100 percent committed’ to running for the 2008 Republican nomination for president, wooed Silicon Valley insiders Monday – saying he is a strong believer in global warming, praising Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as a ‘progressive’ leader on the environment, and calling for immigration policies that welcome ‘people who make contributions’ to America’s economy. Giuliani spoke to about 500…” Now, let me run through these here for just a second, because remember yesterday, folks? One of the things I told you I feared was a “redefinition of conservatism” in order to fit specific candidates, like in the conservative intelligentsia (of which I am proud to not be a member). The conservative intelligentsia is these intellectuals in the DC-New York axis, and they sit around and they choose their candidates, and then they plug their candidates into a new definition of conservatism. They say, “Well, our conservatism is what our candidate is now,” and you’ve got people who are for Giuliani who are saying, “Giuliani is the best conservative in the race.”
Yes, and you’ve got others who are saying, “No, no, no! McCain is the best conservative, and the closest we can get.”
Others are saying, “No, it’s Mitt Romney.”
The point is they’re taking all of these candidates and saying, “This is what conservatism is.” So Giuliani’s supporters, to the extent that they’re saying he’s the best conservative in the race, are somehow going to have to explain him saying that he’s “a strong believer in global warming,” which is a full-fledged, liberal scheme to tax, spend, penalize achievement, and to grow government, pure and simple. Arnold Schwarzenegger as a “progressive leader on the environment”? Schwarzenegger is “progressive,” period! He turned his back on the very people who enabled him to run for governor by the overthrow, the recall of Gray Davis. There’s nothing conservative anymore about Schwarzenegger! Calling for “immigration policies that welcome people who make contributions to America’s economy”? Now, look, Rudy can say what he wants and he can go out there and battle for this office saying what he wants. Don’t misunderstand. All I’m trying to point out is (tap, tap, tap), in terms of Reaganism and conservatism, you’re not going to find it there.
That’s not conservative. Maybe… (interruption) Well, I know Reagan’s not running here, but what are we conservatives supposed to do? My point is the liberals never allow for liberalism to be watered down. They never take a candidate and say, “Candidate A is a lib.” They demand full fealty to full-fledged liberalism! What liberals do is try to fool everybody else into thinking they’re not liberals, but they are. I know there’s not a Reaganite candidate out there, and I’m not saying that we can’t support a candidate who’s not Reaganite, but I don’t want to see conservatism redefined in the process so that conservatism equals: support for the madcap environmentalist wackos on global warming. I don’t want conservatism to be redefined so it supports: illegal immigration. That’s all I’m saying here. I’m not saying these candidates are disqualified. Just don’t start plugging these guys in as definitions of “conservative,” and for heaven’s sake, don’t try to tell me McCain.