RUSH: Here’s John in Cleveland, New York. You’re next, sir, on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, blood-boiling dittos to you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Hey I got a question about this Libby business. I don’t understand why it’s not a crime for Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson to do what they did, because the way I understand it, they were both CIA employees. She was in a position to send her husband on a fact finding trip to Niger, to investigate whether Hussein was trying to buy yellow cake uranium, right? That makes him an employee, too, because he got paid. So they’re both CIA employees. He came back and he lied about his findings in his New York Times editorial. So what they did was a coup attempt to try to discredit Bush’s foreign policy, US foreign policy. They tried to undermine that. I don’t understand why that’s not a crime, Rush.
RUSH: Well, I don’t know that it’s a crime, but the —
CALLER: It is not a crime for a federal employee to undermine US foreign policy? I don’t get that.
RUSH: Well, look, I don’t know that that is a crime, and to be technical, Plame recommended her husband go, but she didn’t have the power to send him. She had to recommend him to higher-ups. It was higher-ups that signed off on it. Is lying in the New York Times a crime? It’s not. There’s freedom of the press. They can say or do, whatever they want to do. That’s not the question. The question is if you know what you just said to be true. I know it to be true. Patrick Fitzgerald was clueless. I really don’t know that he knew. Some people think that, ?Gosh, Rush, he’s a US attorney, a special prosecutor! The guy has to know.? Maybe not. There’s no indication that anything that Patrick Fitzgerald has said that he has any doubts about what Joe Wilson said in his op-ed is true. To me, it’s almost as though the source authority for Patrick Fitzgerald was left-wing blogs.
The source authority for Patrick Fitzgerald was Joe Wilson. Joe Wilson was never put under oath. Joe Wilson was never brought in to testify about any of this. It just seems from right off the top that his version of events was accepted without question. Now, somebody, you would think, in the special counsel’s office would have exposed themselves to alternative theories and the Senate intelligence committee’s report on Wilson’s trip and would have found out that there’s conflict here, that Wilson may not have told the truth in that op-ed. Well, he didn’t tell the truth. If somebody in the office of the independent counsel knew this, they had to totally ignore it. I’m not sure they did. This is Washington. You have to understand that people in Washington, liberals, look at conservative media as it’s from Mars. It’s not to be taken seriously. Conservatives, too, are circus acts. Like animals in the zoo, you watch ’em. You have fun yukking them up and so forth. Occasionally they get out and attack somebody, and you gotta get serious with them.
I don’t know what Fitzgerald’s political orientation is, his party ID. I have no clue. You would assume he’s Republican because he’s a US attorney in Chicago and that the Bush administration puts Republican US attorneys in, but we can’t assume that because it didn’t happen. I don’t know. I don’t know that that matters. But I don’t know how, if anybody in that office knew of the second opinion of Joe Wilson, how it had no effect on them. It’s almost like they didn’t know. As I said, there’s two alternative versions of truth here that just boggle the mind. You’re sitting out there, John, and you know what you know. He may not have exposed himself. He may not know it. In all of his press conferences, Joe Wilson is an angel. Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame were innocent, angelic victims here — and, by the way, get ready: Wilson’s all over TV tonight. He’s going to be on PMSNBC. He?s going to be on CNN twice. He’s going to be on Larry King Alive. He’s going to be on 180 with Anderson Cooper. Kurt, in my adopted hometown of Sacramento, California, hello.
CALLER: Hey, good morning, Rush. Hey, I’m tired. I’m almost ready to throw that hat it. I just don’t see the alternative media working. We’re not driving any agenda. You know, I hear how nobody can win on negative campaigning, yet they sweep in. You know, here’s Libby, he gets convicted on bull — and you know, William Jefferson (D-LA) is caught with $90,000 cash. You can’t even get an investigation on the guy!
RUSH: No, no, there’s an investigation. It just doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.
CALLER: Well, it’s frustrating. I gotta tell you, I mean I’d love to hear some pep talk, but at the same time, I’m just tired of being kicked, you know, and that’s what it feels like as a Republican.
RUSH: I know. It’s what I said earlier. There are gazillions like you out there today. This is the kind of thing that may do more positive to spur Republicans and conservatives across the country into action than anything else the Democrats could have done. But, don’t be too down. I tried to be honest with you. We’re talking Washington here. Of course the new media doesn’t have any power in Washington, and it never will. Washington is a lib-run town. The media and the social aspects and the bureaucracies there are run by liberal Democrats. It’s just the case. Republicans are interlopers and intruders. Again, I hate to keep bringing up Reagan’s name. It’s what made him so special. He was able to get all around it and contravene it and in fact nullify it and dominate it for two terms. Well, the Iran-Contra thing came up, that was a bit of a problem, but the new media is having profound effect with the American people.
The new media is having a profound effect in moving agendas forward. You can’t deny that with the Republican victory in the House for the first time in 40 years in 1994, and Bush’s two wins in 2000 and 2004. I’m not trying to give you a phony pep talk here, but you’re making the mistake of thinking that the new media has power in Washington. It doesn’t. ?But, Rush, but, Rush, there is all kinds of conservative media in Washington.? Yeah, I know. And how often do you get frustrated when you read these people that they are caving or they’re moderating their behavior to get along with the left? They’re saying things so liberals will like them and don’t criticize them. Conservatism’s strength is with the people. As I said earlier, look, it’s just the way it is. How many people do you know, conservatives in college, who just thirst for becoming a bureaucrat in the state department — or a bureaucrat at the CIA or a bureaucrat in the Pentagon? Liberals, they aspire to this. They believe government is the beginning and end of life, and they think government determines policy all over and they want to dominate that.
I’ve had a story the past couple days, but I haven’t had a chance to get to it. The University of California Irvine has gone out, and I forget the funding for this, how it came about, but I think the number is $100 million. I’m not sure. They’re going to start a law school at the University of California at Irvine. It is totally unnecessary. There are more than enough lawyers for the problems that exist in California. Yet all this funding is being made available to start a law school there. Well, I dug a little further. I think I found this at AmericanThinker.com. The purpose of the law school is to train liberal activist lawyers. Lawyers that will work for organizations like the ACLU and the AARP and other liberal organizations like that. Lawyers who will be trained to take on the administration and deny them the right to prosecute the war under the commander-in-chief provisions of the Constitution, as in lawyers who have been trying to undermine military tribunals and the interrogation of prisoners.
It’s a left-wing law school that’s being constructed. This is what the left does. They aspire to these things. Why don’t conservatives mount their own? They have. But it takes awhile. Liberals have been doing this for decades. But these are things that liberals aspire to. Conservatives aspire to different things. A lot of conservatives do not aspire to be oriented in groups. They’re individuals and so forth, and they have their aspirations. How do we go out and change all that? I don’t know. I don’t have enough time to get into that. I’m just giving you a definition right now of the status quo of things. Conservatives, particularly the new media, connect with millions of Americans on the basis that informed Americans will show up and vote and will triumph in the electoral process and send people to elective office that will ostensibly X, Y and Z, based on their campaign promises and so forth.
We get sandbagged sometimes because they get there and after awhile they forget why they got there and they start trying to make the liberals like them and the cycle keeps repeating. But you can’t throw your hat in the ring and say to hell with it, because you’re just ceding things. There has been a lot of progress taking place. Mark my words. The libs here are poking the hibernating bear and they’re going to wake the bear. You’re mad. Everybody that’s called me today is fit to be tied over this. This can do more to revive a hibernating conservative movement than anybody else could, plus the liberals and the Democrats own defeat with the US military and so forth. So don’t cash in the chips. It’s way too soon to do that. That’s not even an option. I don’t want to hear about it.
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RUSH: So we’ll move on back to the phones with a very, very limited amount of busy broadcast time here. Victoria in New York City, thank you for waiting. Your turn to launch.
CALLER: Thank you, Dr. Rush. I’m so, so honored to speak to you.
RUSH: Thank you very much.
CALLER: I?ve been listening to you since you were local here, first day.
RUSH: Ah, that would be July 4th, 1988.
CALLER: That is, yes, sir. I called to say that one of the jurors had contact with someone from the outside during the trial while they were — I think while they were already — whatever the word is —
RUSH: Deliberating?
CALLER: That’s the word, deliberating. A senior moment I have from time to time. Waiting, holding on, I got a little older. Anyhow, and received information that this juror wasn’t supposed to have, and he allegedly shared that information with the other jurors. There should have been an immediate mistrial. However —
RUSH: Well, now, wait. I didn’t hear that. The juror shared the information with the other jurors? I heard a juror exposed herself or himself (it was a her, right?) and it was a decorator or some kind of thing —
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: — or an art person had seen some media, and the judge said, ?You’re gone,? and the prosecution wanted the alternate on there and the defense said, “No, we’ll go with 11,” and the judge said, “All right, we’ll go with 11.” I didn’t hear that the juror shared whatever she saw in the media with the other jurors.
CALLER: Well, the report was that she had shared the information, and they had found out that she shared the information but decided only to make that other juror, the juror that shared the information drop out and they weren’t going to replace her, and I think that is an automatic mistrial.
RUSH: Well, but it wasn’t.
CALLER: No, it wasn’t.
RUSH: The trial is over, and I don’t know. The defense is going to appeal this. I don’t know on what grounds. They’re going to ask for two things. They’re going to ask for a retrial. They will not get a retrial. You can probably make book on that. An appeal is not likely at all. The odds of getting an appeal here are very, very, very, very slim, ladies and gentlemen. I’m just speaking statistically. Not related to the specifics of this case, but statistically, getting an appellate court to look at the trial and say, ?Yeah, the judge screwed up here,? this doesn’t happen much. It does, but not enough statistically to make book on it.
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