RUSH: Washington is abuzz, the Drive-By Media, even though they know what he’s going to say, they’re abuzz with the testimony on Capitol Hill of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker. And, of course, the New York Times yesterday ran an ad purchased by MoveOn.org in which General Petraeus was referred to as General Betrayus. It’s running today. I became aware of it last night, thought it was in yesterday’s paper. But regardless, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to have a stirring monologue coming up on all of this. I’m going to first precede it with relevant sound bites from Democrats on television over the weekend. But before I even get to that, I want to make a point. Logic says that last week was the moment for Al-Qaeda to stage a slaughter in Iraq in advance of this report being released and announced today, to scare the American people and the American left into forcing a withdrawal and a defeat. They didn’t do this, the old Tet offensive, we’ve been hearing they’re going to do their Tet offensive and it’s going to precede this report. It didn’t happen.
Al-Qaeda may be weaker than we actually think, and the polls that are out today might give comfort to the anti-war amateurs and the cut-and-run demagogues in Congress, but the wise men in the Democrat Party, if there are any, and the wise men on the left have to be a tad sick today. The internals of the polls that have been announced today are very encouraging for the president and for the mission. Now, the New York Times asked a question: ‘Is the latest troop surge making the situation in Iraq better or worse?’ Two weeks ago, 19% said better. Today, 35% said better. So 35% as a stand-alone number, nothing to cheer about, but 35% up from 19% in two weeks is good news for the troops, good news for our leaders, and a potential nightmare for the schemers on the left. Let me explain why this is the case. For the first time in years, the good news is leaking out. The surge is working. It’s leaking out not just to you, the great Americans in this audience, but it’s leaking out to America at large. The surge is working. The New York Times has a poll that says the American people want the military to solve this problem and come up with a strategy for victory, not the president or Congress. Or Congress! Or Congress! Or Congress!
The left has cause to worry, I think. I mean really, really worry. They don’t want poll questions like: ‘Should we win or should we quit?’ So those questions are not asked. The left does want questions like: ‘Should we leave now? Should we leave in a few months or a year? So those are the questions that were asked, as if the war is a stay at a hotel, should we stay, should we check out? But it’s a war, and we are starting to win, and our left is starting to lose. Now, they may not know it yet because of their arrogance and haughtiness, and if you don’t know what haughty means, just think John Kerry, who served in Vietnam. That’s haughty, arrogant, elitism, smarter than everybody else in the room, when you are actually a glittering jewel of colossal ignorance, a blithering idiot.
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RUSH: One quick correction on the New York Times poll. I misread it earlier. It was not 19% in May. It was 29% the surge is working: 29% up to 35%. So the 35 number is what’s relevant. Still up six points, and it is a stand-alone number, doesn’t mean much, but it’s up. Despite all the efforts of the Drive-Bys and the Democrat Party to depress the America people’s mood about it, there is progress being shown. I want to go to the audio sound bites and I’m just going to play these bang, bang, bang here with not much commentary, because I have a stirring monologue to follow. First: in his press conference on Friday Harry Reid called General Petraeus a liar.
REID: He’s made a number of statements over the…years that have not proven to be factual. I have every belief that this good man, General Petraeus, will give us, uh, what he feels, uh, is the right thing to do in this report that is now not his report, it’s — it’s President Bush’s report.
RUSH: You know, it’s tough to play these things and not comment. I mean, we’re dealing with treason here. We’re literally dealing with a Democrat Party aligned with its kook fundraisers and supporters to ensure defeat, to attack a man they all voted to confirm. Now, perhaps they might say in private that they voted to confirm Petraeus because they thought he was going to preside over defeat. Who the hell knows? But regardless, the situation on the ground is what it is, and it’s improving — and here these guys have gone so far over the cliff they can’t come back. They cannot get on the side of the American people being victorious. They cannot join us, nor the military, in victory. They have to now tar and feather everybody involved there. Who are they? What recommends Harry Reid as a great military expert and strategist? Same thing with Dianne Feinstein. Same thing with Dick Durbin. Who are these people? On the basis of what is their assessment accepted over the experts? The left relies on ‘experts’ all the time, and their ‘experts’ are always wrong, from measuring the economy, to other things. I don’t want to get sidetracked, but there’s a new hurricane forecast out now. La Niña is back, and that explains why their predictions have been off for two years. Let’s go to Dick Durbin. This is last Friday in Washington, the Center for National Policy.
DURBIN: By carefully manipulating the statistics, the Bush-Petraeus report will try to persuade us that violence in Iraq is decreasing and the surge is working. Even if the figures are right, the conclusion’s wrong.
RUSH: Really? This is the way Evan Thomas of Newsweek analyzed the Duke Lacrosse rape case. Well, he said, yeah, ‘the narrative’ was right, but the facts were not. What do you mean the facts may be right but the conclusion is wrong? The figures are right but the conclusion is wrong? Dick Durbin: ‘manipulating the statistics,’ ‘the Bush-Petraeus report.’ Let’s go back to August 8th, 2007, CNN’s American Morning, the host said to Senator Durbin, ‘These two scholars from Brookings, they were in Iraq recently. They wrote an editorial in the New York Times. They said, ‘Yes, there’s progress. The progress is significant enough that US troops should stay on the ground at least ’til the beginning of 2008.’ Do you see any progress that they were talking about, Senator Durbin?’
DURBIN: As we are seeing military progress, the political scene is very discouraging. We have seen this Maliki government which was once branded a government of national unity coming party.
HOST: But hold on. Let me back you up there. 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 —
HOST: Uh-huh.
DURBIN: — and, naturally, they are routing 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.
HOST: I understand all of that, but, Senator Durbin, everybody in the Democratic Party is saying that the surge has failed.
RUSH: Practically a month ago, just a little over a month ago, Durbin went on television and said it’s working! Friday, he comes out and says that Petraeus is a liar, ‘manipulating the statistics.’ Let’s not forget who Dick Durbin is. Here is a portion of his remarks on the floor of the Senate from June 14th, 2005.
DURBIN 2005: If I read this to you and didn’t tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have happened by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime, Pol Pot or others, that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that’s not the case. This was the action of Americans in treatment of their own prisoners.
RUSH: Let me ask you a question here, folks. Why in the hell should we listen to this man and what he says, or any of these Democrats? Dick Durbin is all over the place. He’s nothing more than a partisan political hack here, which is fine. I mean he’s a Democrat, and he’s a liberal. But this is about US national security, and this is about the truth, and this is about people like Durbin trying to convince as many Americans as possible that the truth isn’t the truth — and it’s going to bite ’em. It’s going to come back to haunt them. Now we move on to the haughty John Kerry. Last Wednesday on the floor of the Senate where he decided he had to agree with Senator ‘Schemer’ about the war.
KERRY: It’s really important that people in quick visits to Iraq don’t get, uh, sidetracked by what’s really at stake here. Anbar province is Sunni violence, eh, by Al-Qaeda against — it was originally Al-Qaeda, and — and — and the Sunni sheiks decided they were tired of seeing their daughters raped and their sons beheaded and violence in their villages, so they took advantage of this moment, and they’ve decided to cooperate with us in order to protect Sunni within their pruh — essentially Sunni province.
RUSH: Now let’s go listen to Schumer from last Wednesday on the floor of the Senate, the thing that got everybody all worked up, because you just heard John Kerry essentially agree with him.
SCHUMER: Let me be clear. The violence in Anbar has gone down despite the surge, not because of the surge. The inability of American soldiers to protect these tribes from Al-Qaeda said to these tribes, ‘We have to fight Al-Qaeda ourselves.’ It wasn’t that the surge brought peace here. It was that the warlords took peace here, created a temporary peace here.
RUSH: Well, isn’t this just great? So we got Kerry and we’ve got Schumer on the same side: that is defeat, the American military is incompetent. Senator Biden also on Petraeus saying that he is dead wrong. The surge didn’t work. He was on Meet the Press yesterday. Tim Russert said, ‘General Petraeus said in a letter to his troops that we have not had the political reconciliation we thought we would have at this time. It’s been much slower, but there is some hope. And then he added this: ‘My sense is that we have achieved tactical momentum and wrested the initiative from our enemies in a number of areas of Iraq. We are, in short, a long way from the goal line, but we do have the ball and we are driving down the field.’ Is that what you expect him to say tomorrow?’
BIDEN: I think he’s dead, flat, wrong. The fact of the matter is that there is — that this idea of the security gains that we’ve made have had no impact on the underlying sectarian dynamic. None! None! Whatsoever.
RUSH: All right. Look, I’m sure that you are as enraged as I am to listen to all this, so let’s turn the tables here a little bit, folks. Did Joe Biden ever serve in the military? Why, then, does his word trump that of General Petraeus, even before General Petraeus has testified? Calling a man a liar before he even testifies under oath, that’s extreme. Did Dianne Feinstein ever serve in the military? Why, then, does her word mean more than General Petraeus’s? Exactly which active service commanders are advising the Democrats? Not the discredited retired Clinton generals who said nothing before 9/11, and who said nothing when Clinton was slashing the military. Where do the Democrats go for their expertise? I want to know. Since their assertions are being treated as fact, and their assertions are being used to undermine a report that has yet to be released, who are their experts? I really want to know what military people they’re talking to. Maybe with their hubris, they’re talking to no military people — and I wouldn’t doubt it. This is purely political on their part. The Democrats are given a free ride on this. We need to take this a step further here, folks.
The Democrats getting this free ride just assumed that Joe Biden — whose only job has been elective office, first on the Wilmington city council, then to the Senate — is a top expert in the military. Why is this assumption made? Well, we know why. Because the Drive-By Media is a bunch of Democrats and liberals, as is Senator Biden, and they are allied and united in their sheer, irrational hatred for George W. Bush and their desire to destroy this presidency and the hopes that it will launch them to presidential power. It’s assumed, by the way, that Senator Feinstein, who was on the San Francisco City Council, and then mayor, and then Senator, and who has reaped millions from this war thanks to her husband’s business dealings, is an expert on the military. How does this happen? How are they automatically anointed experts? All they have to do is come out and say before a general testifies he’s a liar, and the Drive-Bys go (panting), ‘All right! All right! That’s exactly what we wanted to hear!’ Where are the investigative journalists on this? Where are the reporters trying to find out just what the hell is motivating and paying for this action of the Democrat Party? These are citizen legislators. They are not military experts. They may know how to get elected to office, but they don’t know how to fight a war, and that, my friends, I can assure you of. They haven’t the slightest idea how to fight one, nor how to win one.
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RUSH: You gotta hear a couple more audio sound bites here from John Kerry. They’re both from This Week with George Stephanopoulos. The question and the first bite here: ‘Do you trust General Petraeus to deliver a credible and honest report?’
KERRY: None of us should be fooled, not the American people, not you in the media, not us in Congress. We should not be fooled into this tactical success debate. That’s not what this is about. Front page of the New York Times today, an important story about the real tensions in the streets and what is really happening there. I think that they’re courting disaster. I think there is sort of an illusion being put forward, and you can take a tactical success and misread it as we did in Vietnam.
RUSH: Yeah, with you in charge, with you in charge of taking over US military operations, a man who’s done his best to undermine his comrades in Vietnam. This frosts me, folks. This whole series of sound bites I have played for you today have steam coming out both of my ear cavities, and I can’t describe for you how outraged I am in civil language, and so I shall not go further. You get the point. Next question to the haughty John Kerry: ‘Let me turn to that Osama Bin Laden tape. I want to show it. He seemed to be taunting the Democrats for not stopping the war. He said, ‘The Democrats haven’t made a move worth mentioning. On the contrary they continue to agree to the spending of tens of billions of dollars to continue the killing and the war there.’ Now, is it true that there are more troops in Iraq today than when Democrats were elected last November to control Congress? Is that a failure?’ Now, listen, he is being asked to respond to Osama Bin Laden. He is being asked to respond to Bin Laden’s claim the Democrats have failed. Do you understand this? A United States senator is being asked to explain himself to Osama Bin Laden, and, by God, if Kerry doesn’t do it.
KERRY: We don’t have 60 votes, George. No, I don’t think it’s a failure. We have changed the policy. We’ve already changed direction. We’ve had these revaluations taking place. We’ve had an accountability that never existed in the last years. And obviously that’s what elections are about, and 2008 will be about it. Osama Bin Laden’s tape is testimony to one thing, the failure of this administration to capture and kill him, the failure at Tora Bora and the failure subsequently.
RUSH: I’ll tell you, this is just amazing, getting defensive about what Bin Laden says. Well, we don’t have 60 votes out there, George, we’ve done everything we can. It’s Bush’s fault! Because we haven’t captured Bin Laden or anybody of any import. Just unbelievable. Here we have citizen legislators, not military experts, they know how to get elected to office, they know how to fight a war, and yet they’re being treated as the strategic geniuses out there by the Drive-By Media, military experts and such, when in fact they’re simply politicians putting their party and the 2008 election before all else. Why is it that neither their expertise, or their motives, are questioned, folks? These people get free rein on television, I don’t care what the show is, and their announcements, their statements, are considered to be from on high. They are never, ever, questioned. They’re never made to prove it, to explain it. Petraeus, they say in so many words, is a Bush mouthpiece. What are they? What the hell are they? Who are they? What are their motives? We hear none of this. Who’s pulling their strings? We know who it is. Daily Kos, MoveOn.org, George Soros. Osama Bin Laden is pulling their strings. Norman Hsu is pulling their strings. Oprah Winfrey is pulling their strings. This is unbelievable. Who is it that we need to know is behind them?
They can sit there and say that Petraeus is a Bush puppet. Well, they’re nothing more than puppets, these Democrats. They huddle with MoveOn.org; they huddle with Daily Kos and the other hard-left anti-war activists. Why isn’t this repeated in the Drive-By Media? Why is their interest in the number of meetings and phone conferences that go on between the Democrat leadership and these groups not reported? Why is it not reported, folks? Why isn’t there any kind of interest in George Soros, as there was in Richard Scaife? It’s not enough here to say that the media are liberal, by the way, folks. We know that. We know they’re rooting for the Democrats, and they’re rooting for defeat. We know all of that. But we have to demand some facts here. We have to demand an honest debate, regardless of whether the Democrats and the media want one. We have to demand it so that the public knows what’s actually going on here. This is outrageous. It makes me wish I were on that Senate committee right now that is going to interview Petraeus and get his testimony along with Ryan Crocker, because I know what’s going to happen here.
The Democrats are going to stand up and they’re going to ask all these pointed, tough questions and there will be innuendo behind the questions. I would love to be a Republican on this committee today and stand up and excoriate the Democrats for what they’re doing and then everybody go, ‘You can’t do that, the sense of the House, you can’t criticize.’ Fine, I quit. But I’m not quitting before I have to say what I have to say. And I would say this is the most shameful moment in my life as an American. To watch the descent of a once-great party fall into basically an ally with enemies of this country and have elected officials carry that agenda in front of decent, honest men, proclaim them as liars before they even testify up on Capitol Hill. Who’s going to question Joe Biden? Who’s going to question Dianne Feinstein and Dick Durbin, and all the other liberal Democrats about their positions on Iraq over the last 12 months? They have been all over the board. Some of them are saying the surge is working and then they come back and say Petraeus is a liar. Who in the world, ladies and gentlemen, is going to point out to them that they sought to derail the surge, which has been working?
Who is going to make them pay? Who is going to hold them accountable for their investment of defeat? Who is going to point out to them that they sought to slow-bleed the military over the last several months by their efforts to deny them funding? Who is going to point out that they’ve done their best to destroy the morale of the US military over the same time frame? Who is going to point out to them that they have used media appearance after media appearance to smear the troops? They have sought to demoralize the military and the public. Who’s going to point out to them, ladies and gentlemen, that their beloved Bill Clinton and them have so undermined the military during eight light years of his presidency, it’s taken years just to rebuild it in the middle of a war? Who is going to point out to them that they plotted before the release of this report to have other reports issued in hopes of watering down whatever Petraeus has to say? And who’s going to point out to them that they have no plan for winning in Iraq or winning the war on terrorism?
Well, I’m doing it, folks, because the Drive-By Media will not hold them accountable. The Drive-By Media will not remind them of their contradictions. The Drive-By Media will not ask them, ‘Why do you want to lose?’ The Drive-By Media will not say, ‘Why are you actively seeking the defeat of your country in the war on terror?’ The Drive-Bys will not ask them this, nor any of the other questions I have just posed, but they damn well need to be asked. I need to be clear about this, ladies and gentlemen. Liberals and the media do not get to determine what reality is. They don’t get to define it. It is what it is. A phrase that I live by today, reality is what it is. They don’t get to demand all the answers. We get to demand answers from them as well. Nobody is demanding answers from them. It’s about time somebody did. And we get to hold them to account as well. Whether the Drive-By Media does it or not, we will continue to do so here at the EIB Network.