RUSH: Remember when the going in Iraq was really, really tough? There was a clamor inside the nation’s capitol to got rid of Donald Rumsfeld. ‘Get rid of Rummy! Get rid of Rummy!’ Where is the similar call to get rid of Dingy Harry Reid? You know, we had an audio sound bite for you yesterday in which Senator Dick Durbin, in Iraq, went on CNN and said, yeah, the surge is working here. The political process, of course, is falling apart of course and not doing well, but the surge is working. John Roberts at CNN said (paraphrased), ‘Wait a minute. I understand all of the rest what you are saying here about the political process, but the position of the Democratic Party is, this has already failed.’ Of course, Durbin had nothing to say. AP is now on the case a day later, ‘Even some critics of President Bush’s Iraq war policies are conceding there is evidence of recent improvements from a military standpoint. But Bush supporters and critics alike agree that these have not been matched by any noticeable progress on the political front.’ This is Tom Raum of the AP. It’s so damn predictable. You people in the Drive-By Media, all we have to know about what you are going to say about a story, is listen to any Democrat.
He could have said that, but he came out and said — and others are doing it, too, like these two guys from the Brookings Institution that wrote in the New York Times (paraphrased), ‘Yeah, it’s working. We’ve got them on the run over there.’ Why would Durbin do that? He is part of Dingy Harry’s leadership team! I’ll tell you what I think it is. I think that there are — I mentioned this to you, a couple months ago, there have to be — some grown ups in that party who understand that they have gone off the cliff on this, that they are McGovernizing themselves, that they are setting themselves up to not win the presidency in ’08, that they have readopted the same image — they’ve claimed it all over, they never really lost it — they really staked a big claim that they can’t be trusted on national security. They can’t be trusted on defending the country. Period. They want to shut down the surveillance programs. They want to tie everybody’s hands in trying to find out what the next attack is. They want to let all of the enemy combatants out of Club Gitmo. Oh, by the way. I never got around this yesterday. I had a fascinating interview yesterday afternoon with Norman Podhoretz of Commentary Magazine. He has a great book coming out on September 11th.
He calls the war against Islamofascism ‘World War IV,’ and he told me he read the most astounding op-ed in the New York Times yesterday by Wesley Clark and Kal Raustiala. They actually claim in the op-ed that we are going about dealing with these terrorists in the wrong way. To call them ‘enemy combatants’ is to give them dignity and standing that they don’t deserve. What we need to do is treat them as criminals like the Clinton administration did and go after them legally as criminals. They are not soldiers. They are not enemy combatants. It’s the most absurd thing you can believe! The danger here is not just that these guys Clark and the rest of the libs that want these people in the U.S. legal system. It’s just that. It’s the way they think about this, the way they do not recognize the threat the country faces from radical Islam, the Islamofascists. ‘Eh, they’re just a bunch of 7th Century nomads running around. They’ve got some bombs now and then. They’re criminals.’ As these Democrats write these op-eds and as they make these statements, and as Dingy Harry waves the white flag, believe me, they are making an impression on the American people that they have McGovernized themselves. He was a law professor at UCLA, Raustiala, who co-author with Wesley Clark (Ashley Wilkes we call him here) at New York Times op-ed.
They can’t be trusted. They don’t take the problem seriously. I’m telling you, it is going to lead down the road to another embarrassing landslide loss for these people. We had the Rasmussen poll that came out this week, too. You know, everybody’s assuming the Democrats are a slam dunk because everybody hates the Republicans and hates Bush. But the Rasmussen poll found the Democrats have no edge on Iraq, on the economy, or anything else in his surveys that he has taken up to now. In other words, it’s still wide open. Of course it’s wide open! The campaigns really haven’t even heated up, and for the Democrats to be running around thinking that inevitability is theirs, is giving them… Plus, you couple that with the puff pieces that the Drive-Bys write about them all of the time and they are, I think, as a group, unaware of the impact they are making on people in the general population. But there are some adults in the Democrat Party who know. I don’t know who they are. Old guys like Bob Strauss, back from the Johnson days. Jack Valenti was one of those ‘wise men’ of the Democrat Party that kept them from going off the cliff. There’s got to be at least one, somebody there, because there are a whole bunch of stories out there: attitudes changing on Iraq; more Americans linking Iraq to global war on terror, and so forth. I think they probably see these polls, too. They have failed to convince the American people with their allies in the media, that the Iraq war is a separate entity from the overall war on terror. More and more Americans are starting to understand that it’s just a different front in the, in the same war. Well, maybe, maybe, maybe I should rephrase this. Maybe it’s not that the Democrats have failed, and the media have failed in order to persuade the American people that we have gone to hell in a handbasket already over there. Maybe it is that I (ahem) have succeeded in blunting their effort.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Celinda Lake, works with Ed Goeas. Celinda Lake is the Democrat part of the Battleground Poll, which is a highly respected, bipartisan poll and she has this quote that has just been brought to my attention: ‘The administration is aggressively engaged in shifting (public) attitudes. And our side [the Democrats] has been less aggressive than it needs to be. The administration has been making inroads on their Iraqi argument, particularly linking it to terrorism.’ That goes along with all these stories saying that the American people are starting to agree with this. Here’s the thing. This little quote from Celinda Lake illustrates precisely — and I like her — the Democrat mind-set. Their side versus our side in a war about U.S. national security! ‘Our side’ is getting the word out? The president, the White House…? Who is ‘our’ side? Our side is the U.S. military. Our side is U.S. Military trying to make inroads in Iraq, trying to create stability, trying to make a haven for democracy. Our side isn’t the Bush administration, the GOP, but their side is the Democrats! I mean, she’s speaking the truth when she says that the Democrats are engaged in one war only, and it’s the political one against Bush.
You have you to ask yourself: how can we win the bigger war when every Democrat has been called into battle against the commander and chief! I don’t know if they are all homosexuals fighting this battle. You know, Mike Gravel said the Spartans trained their warriors to be homosexual because they fought better. I don’t know if the Democrats are doing that, but hey are lined up in battle against George W. Bush, who by the way can do nothing right, as every success looked at not as a good thing for the U.S. but as a political disaster. Here’s Durbin, by the way. We got Durbin out of our archives. This is from yesterday on CNN’s American Morning. He’s over there in Iraq, and the anchor, John Roberts, asked him, ‘You see any progress that everybody’s talking over there?’
DURBIN: There’s another side to this story that the Brooking Institutions shouldn’t miss. As we are seeing military progress, the political scene is very discouraging. We have seen this al-Maliki government which was once branded the government of national unity, coming apart.
ROBERTS: But hold on. Let me back you up there. (incredulous) You said you did see military progress?
DURBIN: Well, what we find is that the surge has troops going into areas where for four and a half years we have not seen our military in action.
ROBERTS: Uh-hah.
DURBIN: And, naturally, they are rounding out the al-Qaeda in those areas. That’s a good thing. But there is no evidence of the government of Iraq in these areas. There are no Iraqi policemen, no Iraqi soldiers.
ROBERTS: I understand all of that, but Senator Durbin, e-e-everybody in the Democratic Party is saying that the surge has failed.
RUSH: Yes, they are! Everybody. It’s already failed. Dingy Harry is waving the white flag. Something is going on. May not be any wise men in the Democrat Party. There may be a wise person or two in the Drive-Bys that are advising them, here. When I say there have to be some adults in the Democrat Party, I don’t see any evidence of it. I’m just assuming. Maybe it’s some of the Drive-Bys that are advising them, ‘You guys, you’ve really gone off the cliff on this, and you better throw the lifeline out pretty soon or in deep do-do.’