Petraeus Hearings Cook Democrats

RUSH: The president of the United States is going to address the nation for 15 minutes tomorrow night on the Iraq war and the war on terror, and I wonder what the left is going to say about this. Will they say that Bush is just a mouthpiece for the evil General Petraeus, or will they say that Petraeus put the words in Bush’s mouth? Are they going to do a 180 now? Folks, here’s a headline, and this is all you have to know about how the Petraeus hearings went on Monday and Tuesday: ‘Democrats Scramble for Iraq Strategy.’ These headlines are all over the Drive-By Media. When you see that, you know they got cooked, and they know they got cooked. Petraeus ran rings around them. This was another Wellstone Memorial moment for the Democrat Party, these past two days of hearings. Everybody in politics claims to want to go after the independents. This is the kind of thing that infuriates the independents. They don’t like to see a decorated four-star trashed, his reputation attacked and impugned by people. I have finally figured it out. I’ve been all wrong about this. I figured Mrs. Clinton was ahead, so far in the primary polling for the Democrat presidential race because of name recognition and other things. I’ve had to revise this. After watching Barack Obama at these hearings yesterday regarding General Petraeus, I have to conclude he’s a blithering idiot.

I’ve also thought that about John Edwards for the longest time, and that I’ve told you. We’ve been sort of respectful and hopeful for Barack Obama here because the left has tired to take him out on the fact he’s ‘not black enough;’ he’s not ‘down for the struggle,’ all those columns about, ‘Is he black enough?’ And then the guy in the LA Times writes the piece about ‘Obama, the ‘Magic Negro,” and so forth — which inspired a great parody, by the way, heard exclusively here on the EIB Network. So here’s Barack, presidential candidate. We’ve got audio sound bites of this we’ll get to in a while, but you had Dodd; you had Biden; you had Obama, and all of these people took the time for their questioning to simply pontificate, and lecture, and make campaign speeches, and then Obama started whining and moaning he didn’t have enough time for questions. He never intended to ask any questions, is the point, because he was at least smart enough to figure out that Petraeus would run rings around whatever questions he asked. So he just kept pontificating and saying things, and General Petraeus sits there and is professional about this. So you have the Democrats, who will not denounce MoveOn.org, which is good for us. We don’t want them denouncing MoveOn.org. They are afraid to denounce MoveOn.org, and they probably agree with what MoveOn.org did. In fact, I won’t forget the quote that we found last Friday from some unnamed senator, who made it plain, ‘No, we’re not going to call the guy a liar. We have our support groups do that. Our surrogate groups are going to do that.’

They couldn’t restrain themselves. From Tom Lantos, to Biden, to all these guys, they called him a flat-out liar in so many words. Then when you see this headline: ‘Democrats Scramble for Iraq Strategy,’ listen to how this story reads. This is from The Politico: ‘[I]n public, Democrats maintained a brave front, dismissing recommendations from Army General Petraeus as too little, too late and suggesting he was the puppet of an unpopular president. Behind the scenes, though, Democrats are scrambling to deal with a new dynamic on Capitol Hill — they’re the ones who are trying to come up with a new political strategy on the war.’ Does that not say it all about who they are? The one thing that will never enter their calculations is victory. I’m sorry to sound like a broken record on this, but it is true. Here we have the nation at war, and the Democrat Party is ‘scrambling’ for another political strategy because they just had their goose cooked. It is over. Bush is going to get what he wants. This surge is going to go as long as Petraeus recommends it. The Democrats have bombed miserably, and I knew they would. I’ve been confident. I’ve been trying to allay many of the fears that you people have out there, born of history. I understand the fears. But these guys are sabotaging themselves. They’re McGovernizing themselves all over again. They’re doing it in plain view, and they’re doing it arrogantly and proudly, as far as they’re concerned.

They must be proud of what they’re doing, but it’s coming back to hurt them, coming back to harm them. But I think, ladies and gentlemen, the pièce de résistance (also found at The Politico.com, and other places): ‘Senator Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democrat presidential nomination, opened her questioning of Petraeus and Crocker with the standard ‘I honor your service,” blah, blah, blah, blah, ‘then she let the two of them have it. ‘You have been made the de facto spokesman for what many of us believe to be a failed policy in Iraq. Despite what I view as your rather extraordinary efforts and your testimony both yesterday and today, I think that the reports that you provide us really require a willing suspension of disbelief.” Of all people! Of all people to suggest that ‘to accept what somebody says requires a suspension of disbelief’! Mrs. Clinton, for 20 years, we have been in a state of disbelief about you and your husband, and you won’t go away! This is coming from the person who invented and spun all the lies which kept the Clinton administration running. I think, ladies and gentlemen, it’s beyond the pale, and addressing Ambassador Crocker, she said, ‘It’s not only the Iraqi government that’s failed to pursue a coherent strategy. I think our own has as well.’ When she was done, by the way, many of the reporters and about two-thirds of the audience left the hearings. They got out of there.

Willing suspension of disbelief? This is the woman, ladies and gentlemen, may I remind you, who told us she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary. Well, Sir Edmund Hillary was not known when she was born. He hadn’t yet climbed the mountain. It was a lie. It was a flat-out lie, and she told it to a bunch of Australians. Now she has to give back $850,000 of dirty money saying that she didn’t know where it came from. She couldn’t vet the donor. By the way, you go buy a car, and they can find out if you’ve got a criminal record, and they can do it like that. (snapping fingers) Don’t tell me, Mrs. Clinton, Howard Wolfson, and the rest of Clinton Inc., that you couldn’t find out who Norman Hsu is. It’s even worse than we thought. The Wall Street Journal has a front-page story today. Do you know who funded Norman Hsu? Everybody is asking, ‘Where did this guy get the money?’ He got the money in part from a New York financier who was one of the sponsors, founders, creators, whatever, the guy that put on Woodstock; $40 million, this financier gave Norman Hsu! By the way, Norman Hsu, is that his real name? You know, there have been a couple of things I’ve seen, and I can’t confirm this, but he’s apparently got a lot of names. One of them is Hsu Xiao Ling, which is why I’ve been using it, throwing it in there in the first hour. So she says she’s named after Sir Edmund Hillary.

I don’t have time to chronicle all the fundraising scandals of the Clintons in the nineties, because we did that already. She has to give back this 850 grand, but it’s a shell game because the money is going to come back to her. These people can re-donate it if they want. They just don’t have to go through Mr. Hsu. Then she has the audacity to question General Petraeus and to say to believe him requires ‘a suspension of disbelief.’ Now, some of you might support Hillary. Some of you might hold your nose and vote for her. But I don’t know anybody — I really don’t know anybody — with a modicum of honesty who thinks that Hillary’s strong suit is integrity. I don’t hear that said about Hillary Clinton. I don’t hear it said about her husband. Yet this wife of a former president, this junior senator from New York, this no-star senator, challenges a decorated four-star general. What was the phrase that was attached to Bill Clinton? Bob Kerrey, the then-senator from Nebraska called him ‘an unusually good liar.’ William Safire called her ‘a congenital liar.’ But nobody talks about her integrity. What she did to General Petraeus is as absurd, folks, as Alger Hiss grilling General Eisenhower. (If you don’t know who Alger Hiss is, we’ll put a little short history at RushLimbaugh.com.)

Every respected journalist… You know what a ‘respected journalist’ is, and that’s like a journalist respected by other journalists, not respected by the customers, not respected by the American people. Every respected journalist, every one of them, knows the Clintons are notorious from campaign contributions from unseemly characters — and every one of them knows Mrs. Clinton has been on every side of this war, from getting Saddam, to sucking up to MoveOn.org. She has been wherever she’d had to be on this war. Yet what do we hear? What do we read? She says to General Petraeus, his progress report ‘requires a willing suspension of disbelief.’ What really requires a willing suspension of disbelief is Mrs. Clinton’s standing on the war. The media keeps saying Mrs. Clinton hasn’t made any mistakes on the campaign trail. Translation: The media keeps saying, ‘She hasn’t made any mistakes that we’re going to tell you about,’ but she has made plenty of mistakes on the campaign trail. Anyway, they’re cooked, folks. They’ve shot all they’ve got. It came back and backfired on them just as the Wellstone Memorial backfired on them, and now they’re out there trying to cook up ‘a new strategy for the war.’ They don’t have any other strategy other than to lose. So their new strategy, obviously, is going to be a new strategy to secure defeat for the United States of America.

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RUSH: We had a story in the last hour, ladies and gentlemen, from The Politico.com in which it was stated that the Democrats are searching for a new policy now, a new strategy, if you will, on Iraq. They don’t quite know what to do. Well, here it is. Headline: ”Democrats Scramble for Iraq Strategy.’ Democrats are scrambling to deal with a new dynamic on Capitol Hill — they’re the ones who are trying to come up with a new political strategy on the war.’ That alone says a mouthful. Here we have a war over the US national security, and they’re looking at it as a political issue and trying to come up with a strategy. But they have. Bottom line is, they’ve come up with a strategy. Senate Democrat leader Dingy Harry Reid, just saw him on the tube, says that Senate Democrats ‘reject the call by General Petraeus for a reduction of as many as 30,000 US troops in Iraq by next summer, saying it is not enough.’ Withdrawing 30,000 troops does not go far enough. So the new strategy is the old strategy. The new strategy is, ‘No, you gotta pull ’em all out, much more than that, and do it much sooner.’ We disagree. That’s their new strategy, which is their old strategy.

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RUSH: Another brilliant observation made by me, El Rushbo, because I, ladies and gentlemen, can read the stitches — I can see the stitches — on a fastball. The Democrats now have their ‘new strategy’ — and that is their old strategy — of saying, ‘Get us out! We need to have a timetable! We need to get troops out of there.’ So Petraeus comes up with one and they say it’s not good enough. They reject it. They wouldn’t agree with anything. If Petraeus said, ‘We want to get out in six months,’ they’d find a way to disagree with that. It’s too soon or whatever. But what do they keep saying about President Bush? He has a closed mind. He can’t be changed by new information. He refuses to deal with reality! He will not admit his mistakes. Well, General Petraeus has spoken, not glowingly, but realistically, about Iraq. So has Ambassador Crocker. Now, let’s see. Who has the closed mind now, the president or the left? Who refuses to be changed by new information? Who rejects it? Who doesn’t even want to hear the new information, the president or the Drive-By Media and the left? The answer is obvious. Sorry I brought it up, folks. I may have been wasting time (whispers)…not!

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