RUSH: In the meantime, Tina in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Nice to have you on the program.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, 24/7 football dittos.
RUSH: Thank you very much.
CALLER: Okay, my comment’s about the latest resolution in Iraq. Harry Reid sounds really like a spoiled brat, saying that he is not going to — you know, going to be the last one this year, they already know this, the president’s going to veto it, so what’s his point?
RUSH: Well, I’m going to tell you what his point is. I’m going to tell you exactly what it is. Hang on here just a second. Grab audio sound bite number 20. We have Dingy Harry yesterday, he had a press conference on Capitol Hill, and a reporter said to him, ‘[Dingy] Harry, do you have expectations that you’ll be able to get 60 votes for this latest anti-war resolution of yours?’ and Dingy Harry says, ‘I always have expectations to get 60 votes,’ and then added this.
REID: I would hope that the Republicans have gotten the message the American people have had enough of this war and we’ve gotta bring our troops home. Bringing our troops home will be good for our military, but it will also be good for the American taxpayer. We cannot afford this war $12 billion dollars a month? We just can’t — we can’t continue.
RUSH: Folks, this man has literally taken leave of his senses. We’re not spending $12 billion a month on the war. We’re not spending $1.5 trillion dollars on the war, like the Democrats are saying. And here, Tina, the reason he wants out is because we are winning!
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: The surge is working, and they can’t withstand that politically. There has never been — well, this is hard to say — I think there’s been very clear illustrations of the Democrat position on prior occasions, but this shows how invested in defeat that they are. We have stability in Baghdad.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Al-Qaeda has been run out of there except for 13% of it. We have Petraeus representatives that are going to sit down with Mookie al-Sadr, other provinces, it’s all going great. The word ‘victory’ is starting to show up on certain people’s lips, and this scares Harry Reid all to hell. This is sabotaging victory, pure and simple.
CALLER: Well, I have a soldier in Iraq who writes me, and she honestly has commented, people are telling them things, where people are. I mean, they are sounding nothing but upbeat.
RUSH: Well, look, get this story. This is from the blog at TIME Magazine, it’s by Joe Klein. ‘Are We Winning in Iraq?’ Wait, no, he’s worried. Winning in Iraq, in the Drive-By Media. It’s a blog, it’s not the magazine, it’s Joe Klein. ‘And yet: the reduction of violence is real,’ he says. ‘Also obvious: There are fewer votes now in Congress — and less cause — to cut off funding for the war than there were last Spring. A renewed campaign on the part of the hapless Democratic leadership to cut off the supplemental funds will only increase the public sense of Democratic futility. It will also play into the very real, and growing, public perception that Democrats are too busy wasting time on symbolic measures (like trying to cut off funds for the war) and shoveling pork (the water projects bill) to pass anything substantive for the public good. Too much time, and political capital, has been wasted fighting Bush legislatively on the war. I’m sure the President and the Republican Party are salivating over the prospect that Democrats will waste more time and capital over it this month…especially at a moment, however fleeting, when the situation on the ground seems to have improved in Iraq. Democrats need to think this over very, very carefully before they proceed.’ Joe Klein, TIME Magazine, sounding a warning. This is the second. Richard Benedetto at The Politico.com yesterday issued the first warning to the Democrats, don’t do this again, you’re 1-and-40 on this, you’re not going to win this one. But I predicted this. They have no way they can claim partial credit for the victory, folks, because they had us losing this two years ago.
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RUSH: Republicans are seeking a retraction from the Democrats of a report on the hidden costs of the war. ‘Senior Republicans on Congress’s Joint Economic Committee called Tuesday for the withdrawal of a report by the committee’s Democratic staff that argues that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost more than $1.5 trillion. Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, and Rep. James Saxton, R-N.J., attacked the report on ‘hidden costs’ of the wars, calling its methodology flawed and asserting factual errors. The report, issued Tuesday, said the war has cost nearly double the $804 billion in appropriations and requests for war funding thus far. It estimated that the wars have cost the average American family of four more than $20,000.’ Folks, if this war had cost $1.5 trillion, that’s half of the federal budget. But more importantly, every social program that the United States Congress has introduced has never met, never been constrained by its actual proposed cost. Social Security, Medicare, you name it, Medicaid, they all balloon beyond what we are told they are going to cost.
I’ll tell you what this is. It’s just more of the same, of the Democrats trying to sabotage victory here, because they can’t afford it. They are so invested in defeat. The surge is working. Baghdad’s calm. People are moving back to Iraq. Entrepreneurial capitalism is starting to break out in the place. This is the worst thing that could happen to these people, particularly going into a presidential election year. I warned ’em, and I tried to help ’em. You know, you guys in the Democrat Party, we’re going to win this! We are the United States of America. We’re going to win it despite your attempts to secure defeat, and you haven’t done anything that will allow you to lay claim to helping win this. They haven’t done anything. The only way they could do that would be to come up and lie and obfuscate and say that their protests and their resolutions and their clamoring for change forced Bush into a policy that worked. But they can’t even do that, and they’ve opted out of that. They are still trying to sabotage this, and the latest business here, Dingy Harry suggesting lying, that the Republicans had better understand where the American people are on this. The American people are nowhere near on the war in Iraq where they are on illegal immigration.
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RUSH: Sandy in East Aurora, New York, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hello. First-time caller.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: Longtime listener! I think a very good comparison for you to make would be, take all the pork-barrel spending from the beginning of the war and compare it with war costs, and I think it would be very interesting.
RUSH: Pork barrel, earmarks and so forth? I agree with you. It would be very interesting. You don’t even have to do that in order to illustrate this. That would be a good way to do it. But, here we have a war that is being fought in the interests of US national security.
CALLER: Oh, absolutely!
RUSH: This is one of the legitimate responsibilities of government.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: If you start placing a cost on freedom, you’re going to lose it. If you put a limit on how much you will spend on freedom, you are going to lose it. All you have to do is go find not just the pork, find the waste, the fraud, the multiple redundancies of programs in the federal government and point out positive people like Harry Reid, ‘Senator, how is it that you never complain about cost overruns on any other government program other than the war in Iraq?’
CALLER: No matter how frivolous. Absolutely. It makes me want to climb out of my skin.
RUSH: Well, you should want to feel that way. But I think even fighting this comparing dollars to dollars, accepts their premise, and I think that’s where so many of us get wrong in arguing with these people is accepting their premise. When we accept the premise and argue on their terms, it’s a waste of time. What we need to point out is why they’re making the argument and what the purpose of it is. They are attempting to engage this country in defeat. They are trying to secure it. They’re doing everything they can to turn public opinion against it because we’re winning. The word ‘victory’ is coming out of more and more mouths now about what’s happening in Iraq, and that’s the worst political outcome for the Democrats possible. So comparing dollar amounts would be interesting and so forth, but just accepts their premise. I hate accepting the premises of all these liberal arguments.