RUSH: Obama’s liberal buddies are blocking a surge. This is from the blog at TheHill.com, the Briefing Room. ‘Nearly two dozen House liberals have signed onto a bill introduced this past week that would prohibit an increase of troops in Afghanistan. A bill introduced by Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) Thursday would bar funding to increase troop level in Afghanistan beyond its current level. Lee and 21 lawmakers, largely from the liberal Congressional Progressive Caucus…’
Do they really need a separate liberal caucus in the House? Aren’t they all liberal socialist jerks? They need their own separate caucus? They introduced the bill, H.R. 3699 on Thursday. Who is this? Jones. ‘James Jones, the national security advisor vowed that the president’s decision on troops wouldn’t be swayed by politics.’ Wait ’til you hear the next story. James Jones said, ‘I don’t play politics. I certainly don’t play it with national security, neither does anyone I know. I can assure you that the president of the United States is not playing to any political base.’ Mmm-hmm. Right. And here’s the next story from the UK Telegraph. You would not expect to see this here in the US State-Controlled Media.
‘According to sources close to the administration, General Stanley McChrystal shocked and angered presidential advisors with the bluntness of a speech given in London last week.’ Ohhhhh! So that 25-minute meeting aboard Air Force One was a dressing down! Obama flew all the way across the world to yell at his general. That’s another thing I predicted: Hey, he was really there to talk to McChrystal. The Olympic thing was an afterthought. ‘The next day McChrystal was summoned to an awkward 25-minute face-to-face meeting on board Air Force One on the tarmac in Copenhagen, where the president had arrived to tout Chicago’s unsuccessful Olympic bid.’ HIS unsuccessful Olympic bid. ‘In London, General McChrystal, who heads the 68,000 US troops in Afghanistan, as well as the 100,000 NATO forces, flatly rejected proposals to switch to a strategy more reliant on drone missile strikes and Special Forces operations against Al-Qaeda.
‘In a public speech, the general told the Institute of International and Strategic Studies that the formula which is favored by Vice President Joe Biden would lead to Chaos-istan. When asked whether he would support it he said, ‘The short answer is no.” So the general appointed by Obama went public and said Biden doesn’t know what he’s talking about, essentially. He called the place Chaos-istan if Biden wins this. So what we have here is a battle in the administration between General McChrystal who is a genuine general, and General Biden, who’s a general buffoon. And we got these 21 members of the House liberal caucus voting against any money for a new surge in Afghanistan. (laughing) And then there’s this from the LA Times. This is great. This is Gregory Rodriguez. It’s an opinion piece.
The headline says it all: ‘What America Needs is a Good Enemy — An external threat is almost always a cure for National Disunity.’ We don’t have any? We don’t have any good enemies? ‘Where is Osama Bin Laden when we need him?’ is how this piece opens. I kid you not. ‘Where is Osama Bin Laden when we need him?’ That’s like saying when Bush was president, somebody said, ‘Where’s Lee Harvey Oswald when we need him?’ Remember that? And that’s of course when there were no problems with civility. ‘Don’t get me wrong; in no way do I wish death and destruction on our country. But as I listen to the increasingly vitriolic and even seditious rhetoric coming from the political right,’ that would be me, of course, ‘I can’t help thinking that we need a threatening external enemy to help us cohere as a nation — a more looming threat than the almost vanished Al-Qaeda leader or even his recently arrested alleged minion from Denver. …
‘It’s not pretty, but it’s true. Both individual and collective identities are forged as much by declaring what and who you’re against as what and who you are for. Although we certainly don’t wish for violence on the group we identify with, there are times when we can acknowledge the social value of circling the wagons.’ Mr. Rodriguez, dude: The enemy that’s in focus now on the part of the left is the United States as we know it. The big enemy that you and your buddies see when you look out across the world is the United States and its Constitution! That’s the ‘enemy’ that you and Obama and everybody is fighting. And we are not ‘attacking’ my man. We wake up every day and we watch our Constitution and our country under assault and we defend it, and then you get all crying and moaning and whining about ‘the lack of the civility.’
‘With 9/11 less than a decade past, we’ve returned to our corners to fight it out among ourselves with a vengeance. … Despite the fact that we have dangerous global enemies, the members of the disgruntled right seem content to find their primary enemies domestically.’ (laughing) Projection again. It’s just the exact opposite. It’s the left who sees us as the biggest enemy they face. ‘Though angry political dissent is an American tradition, the vitriol is reaching new levels. Last week, a columnist for a conservative website fantasized happily about a coup d’etat toppling President Obama. In the meantime, we all but ignored Bin Laden’s most recent tape, and attention to the arrest and indictment of Afghan Denverite Najibullah Zazi on WMD conspiracy charges has been surprisingly low-key. Such blase responses…’ We? We ignored Al-Qaeda? These guys don’t even want to talk about Afghanistan. You don’t want to talk about it. While we’ve got an enemy, we are at war in Afghanistan, we’ve got a guy in the LA Times wishing for a new enemy so we can all coalesce. It’s breathtakingly ignorant.
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RUSH: Now, one thing that we have to assume here — well, can’t assume it, I mean we know General McChrystal is serious, he’s a general. General Biden is a buffoon. What we ought to do maybe is let’s divide Afghanistan up into three parts, like General Biden wanted to do in Iraq. I remember Biden said he was going to stuff Iraq down Bush’s throat. You remember that quote? ‘We’re going to stuff this bill down his throat.’ Now, we have the worst Afghanistan attack in a year on our troops in Afghanistan. What McChrystal wants to do, he wants to shift US troops away from these remote outposts which is where the killings are taking place. McChrystal wants to shift troops away from those remote outposts that are difficult to defend and move them into more heavily populated areas as part of a new strategy to focus on protecting Afghan civilians and this is what Obama’s waiting on. McChrystal goes out and makes speeches, Obama gets mad, I don’t know if he’s being petulant, I don’t know if he just doesn’t know how to play the Hardball Washington game.
Washington Post: National security advisor James Jones suggested yesterday the public campaign has nothing to do with politics. McChrystal is being shortsighted, comments effectively rejected a policy option that senior White House officials, including General Biden, are considering nearly eight years after the US invasion. It’s Biden that wants to pull back in Afghanistan. And McChrystal says I don’t want to sit here and be part of defeat. And then there’s Petraeus. Military memo, New York Times: ”Voice of Bush’s Favored General Is Now Harder to Hear.’ — Gen. David H. Petraeus, the face of the Iraq troop surge and a favorite of former President George W. Bush, spoke up or was called upon by President Obama ‘several times’ during the big Afghanistan strategy session in the Situation Room last week, one participant says, and will be back for two more meetings this week. But the general’s closest associates say that underneath the surface of good relations, the celebrity commander faces a new reality in Mr. Obama’s White House: He is still at the table, but in a very different seat.’
Petraeus, page two of this story, is a military superstar. He’s got the White House worried. Obama supposedly isn’t, but Democrat political aides fear the presidential qualifications of Petraeus. He hasn’t taken a public stand behind McChrystal yet, but he’s leaving that bit of politics to others. But clearly we’ve got a bunch of people in the White House in totally over their heads on this and they are in fact making political calculations based on Obama’s health care bill.
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RUSH: Chip Reid of CBS News grilled Robert Gibbs on Stanley McChrystal, the general in Afghanistan, today at the White House Q&A. Chip Reid says, ‘Have you heard anybody complain or voice any concerns that General McChrystal is out there pushing his position publicly?’
GIBBS: No. I think that the president believes strongly that we have a process that is working, that we ought to take the time to get this right. As you heard Secretary Gates say, it has been since sometime in the mid-eighties since we actually had a strategy to deal with Afghanistan.
RUSH: What?
REID: If General McChrystal continues to go out and give speeches very forcefully giving his opinion on that that’s fine with the administration and the president?
GIBBS: The president is comfortable with where we’re at in this process and how we’re going about, uhh, getting that strategy right.
REID: In his meeting on Air Force One with General McChrystal he did not in any way suggest that he should stop doing that?
GIBBS: The president had a very constructive meeting about what’s going in Afghanistan not what’s, uhh — going on in, uhh, on cable television.
REID: He didn’t mention the speech?
GIBBS: I — I — I did not get a full download from him.
RUSH: Well, then how do you know what the hell happened, Bob, if you ‘didn’t get a full download from’ the president? But now here’s the White House dumping on its own allies in cable television! Uh, take it back. He probably means what’s going on at Fox. Back to the phones. This is Gil in Philadelphia. Welcome to the EIB Network, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Captain, my captain.
RUSH: Yes?
CALLER: Mega dittos from the land of the Philadelphia Phillies. Listen, I have a question for you. I’d like to make an observation. Have you noticed a word I don’t hear batted around the way it used to be, and that is ‘quagmire’? And you know, of course, the word ‘quagmire’ is an allusion to the word ‘Vietnam,’ which was fought 45 years ago by a left-wing, liberal president who fought a war of containment in order advance a social agenda politically. And I can’t help but think that there are amazing similarities between the situation we were in 1965 and those we’re in today.
RUSH: So you mean Obama’s domestic policies are in a quagmire?
CALLER: No. I mean that just as LBJ fought a war of containment that he was not resolved in winning in order to advance his political agenda — which, of course was, you know, the Great Society — so Barack Obama is fighting a war that he’s not convinced he’s going to win.
RUSH: Oh, you mean Afghanistan?
CALLER: Yes, Afghanistan. Yeah.
RUSH: Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
CALLER: So o he’s fighting this war that has no intentions, evidently, of winning. You know, he can’t afford to exactly lose it because it would really hurt him politically and him politically being hurt would hurt the health care initiative and, his entire agenda.
RUSH: So you think we’re getting a repeat of JFK here?
CALLER: Well, not JFK. LBJ.
RUSH: Or LBJ. So you think it’s a purposeful strategy here to use Afghanistan as a distraction while we don’t win, we don’t lose, to advance the social agenda? Well, I don’t think it’s purposeful at all. The point is that LBJ in memoirs that were written subsequently it’s been revealed supposedly or alleged that he knew all along, you know, that he couldn’t win the war in Vietnam but he didn’t want to pull out because he wanted to keep certain Democrats on board for his Great Society policies. And the only way he could do that was to not necessarily win the war in Vietnam but fight the war in Vietnam.
RUSH: Well, I’ll tell you what. I’m going to say that even though I don’t quite get the analogy, I hope you’re right. Because LBJ did not run for a second term. Because Vietnam’s quagmire ruined him. Remember, LBJ lost Walter ‘Klondike.’ When Walter Klondike said we couldn’t win the Vietnam War, LBJ happened to be watching in the White House, ‘Oh, I’ve lost Klondike. I can’t win the war.’ So I don’t see anybody in the media saying we’ve lost Afghanistan — and, quite frankly, if we do lose Afghanistan, I see enough people in the media applauding it that it won’t hurt. This Afghanistan business is an interesting thing ’cause I don’t think he knows what he’s doing. He’s in this public spat with this general now, and he’s got the general pit against Biden. In Vietnam, we lost 50,000 kids there, 50,000 troops, and we had maximum number of 500,000 over there at one time, and we’re not going to be anywhere near that in Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan has not been sold like Vietnam was. ‘Well, this is to stop the domino March of communism. We’ve gotta go in there and stop it over there,’ blah, blah, blah. Don’t forget JFK actually started it to distract people from his affairs with Marilyn Monroe. So we have some parallels here that are not quite the same. But I hope your analogy is right, because if he follows the path of LBJ, he will not seek a second term, something I doubt. Bostic, North Carolina, Frank, welcome to the EIB Network. Great to have you here, sir.
CALLER: Hey, how you doing, Rush?
RUSH: Just fine. Thank you very much. You bet.
CALLER: Hey, it’s an honor to talk to you, Rush. I wanted to speak with you about the double standard in this country. Take somebody like David Letterman and he can fondle or have sex with somebody. And anybody else that is involved in any kind of sexual harassment, you have the National Organization for Women and you have all these different women’s groups that come up to bat, where are they all at now?
RUSH: They’re in the same spot they were when they were with Clinton, asking themselves, ‘Oh, my God, why not me?’
CALLER: (laughing)
RUSH: ‘Why couldn’t I have been there?’ (laughing)
CALLER: (laughing)
RUSH: That’s where they are.
CALLER: Well, you know, I finally got a chance to talk to you and I’m tongue-tied. I’m really excited about being able to speak with you. It’s an honor, and I think you’re a patriot and a real American, and the things that I hear you say on the radio are the things that I was brought up on. And it’s just a real privilege and I hope that you’ll keep fighting for us.
RUSH: Thank you very much sir. As I assured a bunch of people on the sideline last night pregame before the Steelers-Chargers: ‘I am not quitting until every American agrees with me,’ which means, my friends, that I plan on immortality. I read the story on that last week and I’m going to do what it takes.
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RUSH: All right, Tom in Freeland, Michigan, great to have you on the EIB Network, sir. Hi.
CALLER: Oh, it’s my pleasure to be on, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Glad to meet you. I noticed on Stephanopoulos yesterday, I couldn’t believe it. They were talking about justifying a war in Afghanistan with the purge, so on and so forth, and just as the conversation was tapering off Cokie Roberts said that President Obama would be abandoning the women that were, as we know, so subject to the wrath of the Taliban. With the chickification of America, as you have so aptly coined the phrase —
RUSH: A chickification which, by the way, I have resisted. It has not happened to me. Let’s be clear about that.
CALLER: Now it’s happened to war.
RUSH: That’s right.
CALLER: Now it’s happened to war. Cokie Roberts wants our boys to die in Afghanistan for chickification reasons.
RUSH: Wait, wait. I find this fascinating. We can’t pull out of Afghanistan because of betraying the women there. Cokie Roberts, I understand this. But she’s not far off here. If we pull out of there now, every ally we’ve got — and we’ve got our own spies over there and we’ve got contract agents working for us. We’ve got US military personnel on the ground. If we pull out of there, everybody that’s worked for us is dead. Everybody that has supported us, I’m talking about Afghanistan people, I’m talking about Afghanis, they are dead if we pull out of there. Not just the women in their burqas and so forth. A lot of people dead if we pull out. Even children are taught this. You don’t start something you’re not prepared to finish. Obama, this is his now. We were there before he got there but he ramped this up and I’m wondering how much of it was genuine or because he thought he had to just because during the campaign the Democrats say we should never have been in Iraq, we should have been in Afghanistan. That’s where we needed to be. Bush distracted us from the real problem. That’s where Osama is. We need to going after Osama. Now they couldn’t care less about Osama.
Now we got stories from the State-Controlled Media, Osama, he’s a has-been, he’s yesterday’s news. Letterman is the man of the hour. Osama’s nothing. We don’t need to catch Osama. In fact, we don’t even need to stay in Afghanistan. Why, it’s a lose-lose over there. We gotta get out of there. He went over there ramped it up, chose his own general, McChrystal. Because even the fringe left was saying, Afghanistan’s where we gotta go if we’re going to go anywhere, and we gotta get out of Iraq. We got to close Gitmo, get out of Iraq. Afghanistan, that’s what Bush didn’t do. So he’s kind of caught there now. Biden wants to pull out of there. If he lets Biden run this, if he doesn’t listen to the general whose job it is to win these things, if he’s not going to listen to him, then it’s not just the women in Afghanistan who are going to be losers. The whole country will be losers, but the people that worked with us are certainly dead, if we pull out of there.