RUSH: Here’s sound bite #22 of the Chris Matthews. Matthews bringing up Alger Hiss and all kinds of things. This is from Chris Matthews’ early analysis of the verdicts, to give you a good indication of the way the Drive-Bys are looking at this and always have, to prove my point.
MATTHEWS: This is all about the war in Iraq. Of course it’s a perjury case, but to limit itself to the legal aspects is to limit the Alger Hiss case of 1950 — that great Cold War spy case — to the simple matter of perjury. This is not about perjury. It’s about the larger question of how we got in this war with Iraq and the case that was made by the vice president and his chief of staff that we faced a nuclear threat from Saddam Hussein.
RUSH: It is not about that. The Drive-Bys made it about that because they wanted it to be about that because they wanted to criminalize policy. They?ve been beating this drum every night ever since this case got going, and before, and during the investigation. Comparing this to Alger Hiss, folks? This is insane! Alger Hiss was a communist spy, for crying out loud! Of course the left hated Richard Nixon because Nixon was the guy who got Hiss. They’ve been trying to get even for years. To say this is all about how we went into the war are Iraq? It was not about that, Chris. It was nowhere near close to that.
You guys made it about this, and who knows how you tainted the jury pool along with the independent counsel and his flowery press conference talking about the sanctity of CIA agents and how their privacy and security and being able to work unknown to the general public is crucial to national security and so forth and on, when this case was not about that at all. But you have to get ready for this. You watch the Drive-Bys this afternoon and tonight. Be prepared to hear just this kind of thing. Before this night is over, if you watch these television shows, you’re going to be told and you’re going to hear, that this conviction today essentially means that Bush lied to get us into the war with Iraq and there was no reason to go. Mark my words.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Wichita, Kansas. This is Drew. Your turn next on the EIB Network, sir.
CALLER: Hey, Rush! It’s good to talk with you again.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: This is like our once-a-decade conversation. You and I get to talk about that often. (Laughing.) I have a question, something you were talking about with this trial — and I agree it’s a travesty. I think most grand jury trials have to be almost considered that, but in this case in particular, the ancillary conversation came along that this was the CIA making payback. This was the justice department who doesn’t follow up and prosecute on cases like the Burglar case. But both of these organizations, both of these departments work for the president. What’s going on here if we’re not keeping control of these departments? Shouldn’t we…?
RUSH: It’s a popular misconception that these people work for the president. In all three — in the CIA and in the state department and the Pentagon — you have career people who have been there many, many, many moons. Most of them are liberals. It’s Washington. These are the kind of jobs liberals aspire to. Liberals want to work in government to shift it and manipulate it. They want to populate it, because liberalism believes that government is the end-all for every problem that exists. So they aspire to these jobs. Conservatives don’t. They don’t want to be staff pukes. The president appoints the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He appoints the director of the CIA, the secretary of state, but if you don’t think there are people in the state department that have been trying to undermine Condoleezza Rice, then you don’t know the reality of how Washington is.
It is not accurate to say that the CIA works for Bush. They don’t. They pride themselves on their independence, and the state department actively works against Bush and many people in the state department do. They totally oppose any of the Bush administration policies, even though he appoints the secretary of state. And Rice, her job is not to go in and clean out the state department. She’s got a job representing the country, promoting presidential policies within her purview around the world. At CIA, Porter Goss was tapped to replace George Tenet. He was a member of Congress from Florida. He was on the intelligence committee. He got sent up there, and he starts rooting out the place. He starts getting rid of some of the dead wood and some of the shadow government types, Clinton holdovers and so forth. Look what happened to him. He’s out. He was stabbed in the back by another administration member. I don’t know who, but these things happen. Many people who have a — and I’m not talking about you, Drew. Your question is a good question. Many people have a Civics 101 understanding of government and they think the president is all powerful and is the boss of everybody. I’ll betcha if people inside write books down the line (and it doesn’t happen much), I’ll bet we would be… Well, I wouldn’t be. I will bet you would be stunned to learn just how many ongoing efforts there have been to undermine this administration at virtually every step of the way in Iraq.
Look, I can take you back to when the Iraq war was just being talked about as a possibility. You go to New York Times one day and open it up, and there’s the battle plan. Somebody in the Pentagon had leaked what we were going to do with comments, ?This is absurd. This isn’t going to work.? Everybody said, ?Well, why can’t Bush control this?? Well, tell me what president has been able to control leaks, other than Clinton? They have their own methods. Same thing at the Washington Post. You?d open up the Washington Post one day and there would be sources from the state department trashing the war plan and giving up details and the secrets that were entailed in the war plan, what we were going to do. The administration sits there and they just have to ignore it. But the idea that there are not people inside these agencies that want to undermine this administration is na?ve. They’re there. First and foremost, it’s about protecting their own little backyards, their own little fiefdoms — not just the whole agency, but little fiefdoms inside the agency. Pentagon, too, folks.
I’m convinced that one of the elements or areas of all of the anti-Rumsfeld sentiment was because he was trying to shake the place and up modernize it. I had dinner with some people last week, and they follow politics on a surface level and the media is their primary source of things. One of my guests said he knows somebody who knows somebody in the Pentagon and he started telling stories about how these guys hate Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld this. Rumsfeld that.Rumsfeld was horrible. My friend bought it hook, line and sinker because somebody at the Pentagon was saying it. The long knives have been out for Rumsfeld from day one. When he wants to modernize, when he wants to downsize, there were a lot of people that work in the Pentagon who may lose their jobs if the downsizing continues. If the reforms that Rumsfeld wanted succeeded, you’re going to impact a lot of people who have jobs based on the status quo. If there’s ever a town that is status quo, it is Washington and all of its bureaucracies — and anybody comes in and wants to downsize them, reorganize them, reform them, redirect them is going to be the target of a destruction campaign. You?re talking about people’s jobs. You’re talking about their social status. You’re talking about all kind of things that have nothing to do in many cases with policy, and in other instances it has everything to do with policy. It has everything to do with holdovers.
One of the reasons that Bush did not clean house as much as he could was the new tone. We’re coming off the eight years of Clinton. The country is said to be too partisan. Bush wants to come in and unite the country like he did the Republicans and Democrats in Texas. Part of that was having the Kennedys come up to watch movies in the White House and let Ted Kennedy write the first education bill of Bush’s first term, letting Democrats appointed by Clinton hold on. This is the kind of thing. Conservatives do this. Republicans do this all the time: just be nice to these people and we will get along with them, cooperate, and do good things for the country. It never works out because liberals aren’t interested in that. Liberals are interested in demolishing opponents and forever getting rid of them and triumphing on policy at all times. That’s why they live and that’s why they covet jobs in Washington and in bureaucracies, because that’s where policy is made and effected or subordinated or sabotaged.
The current crisis or controversy over these US attorneys is a great, great example. Seven US attorneys have been fired by the Bush administration. Fine. They’re totally allowed to do this. The Bush administration could put anybody in there they want. Nobody’s talking about the fact that when Bill Clinton got into office in 1993, he fired every US attorney in the country. Every federal district with a US attorney, Clinton canned them, because they were Bush holdovers. Clinton put his own people in. Nobody thought anything about it. This happens. Bush did not. As I mentioned to you earlier this week, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York — that’s Manhattan — for the first five years of the Bush administration was a Democrat, a prot?g? of Chuck Schumer’s. Mike Garcia, the current US attorney in New York for the Southern District of Manhattan, was not appointed until a year and a half or two years ago, something like that. So the first four or five years we had a Democrat US attorney run the office. He assigns all the cases and reviews what the associate US attorneys are going to do. He’s a prot?g? of Chuck Schumer.
So now Bush has gotten rid of seven US attorneys, and the Democrats are raising holy hell. ?Why…? Why, what’s happening here?? They’re demanding to know why they’ve been fired. ?Job performance or is it political? Is Bush trying to get rid of these guys because they’re getting too close to the Bush administration, corruption?” and so forth and so on. This is the price the administration is paying for waiting so long to do this when it would be totally expected if he’d have just fired every one of them. This is what I’ve always told you: Bush is not leading a movement of conservatism. He’s a Republican, and he’s got these ideas. He came in and he’d done great things in putting people together in Texas and thought that he could accomplish it in Washington. But the Florida aftermath destroyed any, any opportunity or chance there was going to be for any kind of cooperation or comity between Republicans and Democrats in Washington.