2006 Election Wasn’t About Iraq

RUSH: Here’s Brian, Raleigh, North Carolina. Hello, sir. Thanks for calling.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Greetings from the Tar Heels State.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: Question. In the first part of the hour, you cited a 72% disapproval rate for Governor Spitzer’s proposed plan as justification for yanking it, and I’m wondering why the same or similar disapproval rate for the Iraqi war is not justification for yanking that and for you further to get your considerable clout behind a grassroots effort to do that.

RUSH: Well, in the first place, if the polls actually showed 72% of the American people wanted out of Iraq, we would be out of Iraq, and the Democrats wouldn’t have had any trouble passing a resolution, as this immigration bill indicates. You know, I’m going to take a break. But you have provided me, Brian, with an excellent transition. I went back and I looked at something. I know people think that the November ’06 elections were about getting out of Iraq. The Democrats have been running around saying, ‘We were elected to get us out of Iraq.’ So I went back, I looked at the exit polls, because I knew that wasn’t the case, but I wanted to document it. And, Brian, I’ll just give you a little hint. On the exit polls, you know what the number-four issue was? Iraq. And it wasn’t getting out. It was doing it better. Hang in there, Brian. Keep listening through the break, because the two issues do not have the same degree of passion. If the passion to get out of Iraq was the same as the passion on illegal immigration, we would have been out of there by now.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

When a person — usually a liberal, or a member of the Drive-By Media — says that the 2006 November election was about withdrawing from Iraq, is that person a storyteller? Is that person a liar? Is that person a manipulator? Let me ask it this way. When a journalist accepts that the 2006 election was all about Iraq, is he or she uninformed? Is he or she a pawn? Is he or she an anti-war activist? Or just a rotten journalist? Today, I ask this question: Can truth trump what the Nazis called ‘the big lie,’ or we call ‘truth by repetition’? I went back, because I keep hearing this. We just had this guy, Brian, from Raleigh, who wanted to know, ‘Well, hey, look, if 72% of the people want no amnesty for illegals and no driver’s licenses for them, and 72% of the people want us out of Iraq, how come we’re not in Iraq, and the illegals don’t get their driver’s licenses or amnesty?’ I said, ‘Because the polls showing 72% want us out of Iraq are not accurate. The 2006 election was not about that.’ I went and I looked at the exit poll data from 2006, and if you are a Drive-By news junky — meaning if you spend all day watching cable news, reading the New York Times and Washington Post, et al — you are in for quite a surprise.

Iraq wasn’t the first issue. It wasn’t the second issue. It wasn’t the third issue mentioned by voters that was most important to them. It was the fourth issue, and it wasn’t necessarily about leaving Iraq. It was about the progress or lack of it in Iraq. It did not specify, ‘Yes, the fourth thing most important to me is to get out of Iraq.’ What was stated was, was about the progress, or lack of it. Now, this is only common sense. The Democrats have offered 40 resolutions to get us out of Iraq. They have lost them all. Well, they won one, but President Bush vetoed it, and they didn’t have the votes to override. They’re 40-and-one, and they’re back for more. That’s coming up in just a minute with good old Dingy Harry. He’s so invested in defeat, and that’s because we’re winning. The Drive-Bys now are starting to acknowledge, and the Democrats cannot have that. This cannot stand. That’s why they want to pull these troops out of there now, do whatever, screw up the funding, do whatever they’re going to do. They’re serious about it.

But back to the exit polls for a second. For you pretend journalists out there, for those of you who say you practice journalism, the number one issue on the exit polls in 2006 was corruption. Corruption! It was earmarks, and corruption by high officials. The number two issue in exit polls, the economy — and the left is doing everything it can to slow it down, trash talk it, and ignore the good news. The number three issue in the exit polls was terrorism — and guess what? The left is doing everything they can to make it harder to deal with terrorists. Did you ever hear a Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi say the 2006 election was all about dealing with terrorism? Did you ever hear them say the 2006 election was all about the economy? Did you ever hear them say it was all about corruption? No, you hear them say it was all about getting us out of Iraq, and it was not, according to the exit polls. Speaking of corruption, ‘President Bush vetoed the Labor, Health and Human Services Education Appropriations bill that was enacted by the Democrat Congress. The bill contains $10 billion in spending that was not in the president’s budget.’

It’s not a whole lot of money, but the veto was important, because this bill — the Labor, Health, and Human Services Education Appropriations bill — ‘included a number of earmarks that were dropped into the bill in conference,’ and, therefore, nobody knew about it. They had no public scrutiny. Can you say corruption? ‘The bill included around 2,000 earmarks that nobody knew about, until the president saw it and vetoed it. One million dollars requested by Senators Reid, Byrd, Tim Johnson, and Tom Harkin for the Thomas Daschle Center for Public Service and Representative Democracy in Brookings, South Dakota; $1 million requested by Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, for the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock.’ That was vetoed. One thousand dollars ‘requested by Representative Sam Farr (D-CA) for O’Neill Sea Odyssey, an educational program conducted on board a 65-foot catamaran sailing Monterey Bay.’ There were 2,000 other of these earmarks. Corruption was the number-one issue on the exit polls from the 2006 election.