The argument about Kerry's remark regarding terrorism, and how the goal should be for it to be a "nuisance" once again, is flawed in a fundamental way. I don't always agree with Rush, but this time he hits the nail on the head with this argument with a caller from NC:
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RUSH: To the phones we go now as we start intermingling those who listen to this program as part of the content and we'll start, this is Charlotte, North Carolina, with Adam. Nice to have you, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, good to talk to you, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Listen, I just have to take issue. I listen to you all the time and I don't disagree with a lot of what you say, but I just don't understand why you can't concede that Kerry does have a point. Terrorism is not going to be -- what he's saying is that terrorism is not going to be able to be eradicated totally, and I think that everybody knows that. You're always talking about how the American public is smarter than we give them credit for, and most people sort of get that the only way to grow religion is to persecute it, and that's what they see us doing.
RUSH: The only way to grow religion is to persecute it?
CALLER: I mean not the only -- the quickest way to grow religion is to persecute it. You're going to coalesce a whole group of people that otherwise wouldn't have had as much --
RUSH: You know, let me tell you something. Adam, how old are you?
CALLER: I'm 26.
RUSH: 26. Are you in school? Are you working? What are you doing?
CALLER: I'm working. I'm going back to school soon to be a teacher, but yes, working now.
RUSH: You're going to be a teacher?
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Then I want you to do something for me. I want you to go back and learn some history, because you are unfortunately sadly so wrong about this. You know who you sound like? You sound like the British Labor Party prior to World War II. "We can deal with Hitler, we can make a deal with him. Hitler doesn't want to do anything other than run his own country. If we go after Hitler we're only going to going to make him mad. We've got to gear up for another war coming after World War I. We can't do this." There was one man that sounded the call. Winston Churchill warned them what was going to happen and Churchill was right. It's not persecuting a religion and making the religion stronger. We were attacked. You have in your head what John Kerry means and you think we've got to manage terror. Don't forget John Kerry said he's being consistent here. He said one time ago that the terror threat in this country is exaggerated anyway, that Bush has exaggerated the terror. And Teresa Heinz Kerry who knows him in the Biblical sense to bring religion into it, at one time said hey we're just going to have to learn to live with it like the Europeans do, remember that? We just gotta learn to live with terrorism, the Europeans do this all the time. And then you have these quotes from Kerry in the New York Times Sunday magazine yesterday, where he wants to treat it as a law enforcement issue just as we did during the nineties. He wants to treat it as a nuisance when some Americans die occasionally, but not enough Americans die all at once to warrant us doing anything about it, we want to manage terror? How? Who we gonna manage terror with? Who we going to talk to? What are we going to give them? What are we going say to make them stop? How do we manage terror?
In the meantime, the one person who's understood this threat and dealt with it accordingly is George W. Bush. And since 9/11, you look at all of the opportunities Al-Qaeda and anybody else has had to repeat 9/11 in this country, around the world, we've had Olympics, we've had World Series, we've had Super Bowls, we've had parades, we've had conventions, we have had elections, any opportunity, abundant opportunities for Al-Qaeda to show they're still strong and on the march and to recruit, and to get even more blood-thirsty murderers to sign up with them, and not one attack on our soil. Somebody must be doing something right, and guess what? We're not treating it as a law enforcement issue. We are treating it as a war. I don't know what you think is law enforcement about the World Trade Center and the Pentagon being blown up in the spate of an hour and a half on September 11th. This idea that you can manage this problem and make it go away so it's only just a nuisance, you need to run around in your history books if you're going to be a teacher, Adam, you need to run around and take a look at all the appeasers in the past who have been proved wrong, and they are proved wrong because they don't understand evil. They don't understand bad guys, if you don't like the term evil. And, frankly, they don't even understand criminals if you want to get down to it. Because ultimately they blame America for causing all of this because we're too powerful or we're too big or we're to prosperous or we're to wealthy or we're too rich.
Well, frankly, I'd rather be on a course where we haven't had a port blown up, we haven't had a ballpark blown up, we haven't had a parade blown up, we have not had any more tall buildings blown up, none of our elections have been cancelled or blown up, and none of our political conventions. All of these opportunities where we thought it was going to happen, it was a ripe opportunity, and we're told it's going to happen not if, but when, we can't stop it. But it hasn't happened. And we're not fighting it as we did in the nineties when it was treated as a nuisance. When they blew up the World Trade Center in 1993, fine, go after the two guys that did it, put 'em in jail, bammo, sure stopped it, didn't it? Talk to the families of the dead at Khobar Towers, the families of the dead in Saudi Arabia, the families of the dead on the USS Cole. That's a nuisance, when Americans die only occasionally and in manageable numbers so that we don't have to gear up and actually treat this as a problem. We can just treat it as a bunch of madmen, and oops they slipped through our grasp this time but we'll do better next time.
This is the most irresponsible statement on what we face that I have come across yet, and then, Adam, when you add the quote from little Ricky Holbrooke who will be Kerry's secretary of state, ostensibly, if Kerry wins, here's his quote. "We're not in a war on terror in the literal sense. The war on terror is like saying the war on poverty. It's just a metaphor. What we're really talking about is winning the ideological struggle so that people stop turning themselves into suicide bombers."
Well, hell's bells, what are elections in Afghanistan about, Adam? Go read your history books. Go take a look at what freedom does for people around the world. And that's what we're trying to do. We've got some lame brain who planted trees in Kenya who wins the Nobel Peace Prize, who then comes out and says that AIDS is manufactured to wipe out black people. Meanwhile, George W. Bush has liberated 50 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan, and doesn't even qualify for the Nobel Peace Prize. It's absolutely absurd. And this is the kind of gunk and garbage that's taught in academia today and in the public school system. The fact of the matter is if Holbrooke says we've got to change and win the ideological argument. Where does that take place? We're not in an ideological argument with bin Laden, we're in an ideological argument with the young people in these countries that are born and taught rage and hatred in school from the time their mommies send them away from home. It's just absurd to sit here and say that this is something that needs to be managed. It's a growing problem, it has been growing, but because it's so slow -- you know, Adam, you remind me of the frog in a pot of cold water. They turn on the flame, and it heats up gradually. By the time the frog thinks it's hot, he's dead, he's been boiled to death. And if we leave it up to thinking like yours we're going to be the frog in the boiling pot of water.
The fact of the matter is we've got a track record of success to show here, and we've got the Democratic Party's two nominees for president and vice president running around with the biggest pitch of doom and gloom and fear-mongering, lying through their teeth. It's gotten to the point that Kerry is out there now saying too bad Christopher Reeve died, if he just stuck around a little bit longer stem cell research that Bush opposes might have made him walk again. Well, Bush is the only one who's funded stem cell research, number 1. Number 2, there's no evidence whatsoever that stem cell research is going to cure anything. Just a classic example -- now Kerry is out there saying, "Well, we need to manage this. We need to get back to where it's just a nuisance." And here's Holbrooke.
By the way, the war on poverty, we finally have a liberal Democrat admitting here we're not trying to win that? It's just a metaphor? The war on poverty is just a metaphor? He's equating it to the war on terror. We're not trying to win the war on poverty, either? That's going to come as news to LBJ's ghost.
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