RUSH: It's fascinating to look at the reactions of various people to the New York Times story today that everybody is talking about. I mean, the people like us, conservative Americans, we read the New York Times story and we see a couple of salient points. We see that the New York Times has put on the front page the fact that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program and was plotting to build an atomic bomb as early as the early nineties! We see this. It's plain as day. The New York Times confirms that in 2002 Saddam's scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb and that they were as little as a year away, and if we hadn't eliminated that threat -- they don't say this, but had we not eliminated that threat, today we might be facing a nuclear armed Iraq.
I think it's also bye-bye Joe Wilson time, even though that's not mentioned much in the story. What would Iraq need to build a nuclear weapon? Yellow cake. And what did what's-his-face Wilson tell us that Iraq had never attempted to do, which was a total lie. Now, the people on the left, liberals and Democrats look at this story and say the Bush administration's incompetent for posting this stuff on the Internet! (Laughing.) That it helps Iran come up with a nuclear weapon. People have forgotten something. You remember Operation Merlin? That was a Clinton administration attempt to fool the Iranians. They had a Russian double agent, and this double agent gave supposed secrets building a nuclear bomb to the Iranians. But the problem was that there was so many obvious errors in it that scientists, Russian scientists would be able to catch them and fix them. The program bombed royally. But another thing about this that's somewhat quaint is you have the mantra that Bush is incompetent. By the way, the real thrust of this story, if you haven't read it, the real thrust of this story is to blame congressional Republicans for this because, if you'll recall, all of these documents were being sifted through and people were dying to know what was found in the search for weapons of mass destruction.
A lot of us were very frustrated that the Bush administration didn't seem interested in disclosing what they had discovered or was just too easy to write off the fact that there weren't any weapons of mass destruction. There were a couple of congressmen led by Pete Hoekstra, who demanded this stuff be released so people could see it. Negroponte was opposed to doing this, said there's no smoking gun in here, there's no point in doing this. Bush finally ordered it done. This was months ago when this happened, back in the spring when this happened. Now all of a sudden the New York Times goes to the website and finds that are instructions to a certain extent on how to build a nuclear bomb and the left is all concerned now about Bush's incompetence and posting this stuff on the Internet. They do not see, they do not see at all the unmistakable fact that Saddam was within a year of having perhaps an atomic bomb. They don't see the correlation of going in and stopping this whatsoever. They also do not see the irony, ladies and gentlemen. Here's the New York Times upset about classified government documents showing up on the Internet.
Now, the New York Times had put them in the newspaper, why, the public's right to know. But now they turn around and they don't like these kinds of postings on the Internet. I guess because they didn't get it exclusively, so the left is all talking about how the government's incompetent, can't keep secrets, posts this stuff on the Internet. By the way, the government's taken it down now. The government has taken the website down. It's an exercise in how people of different ideologies or persuasions see things. But here's the bottom line, folks. For those of you out on the left, you cannot hold two positions at the same time. You can't run around out there and say that Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction, didn't have WMD programs, and that he had at the same time advanced knowledge of nuclear weapons that would be of use to Iran. You just can't do that. And you also can't sit here and try to tell us that Iran has a peaceful nuclear program while at the same time being worried about the fact that they might have stolen Saddam's secrets on nuclear weapons from this website.
So the conflict here is really about people on the left. And, of course, the Drive-By Media, "Will this affect the outcome of the elections? Will this have any impact?" We have a little montage here. We have Matt Lauer and Norah O'Donnell, Wolf Blitzer, Soledad O'Brien, and somebody else from CNN, in a frenzy about this story and the story involving Reverend Haggard who supposedly heads up the National Council of Evangelicals. He's supposedly taking methamphetamine and having gay sex, and he's denying it all, wondering why this has been leaked or reported or alleged at this late stage of the campaign. The media is just in a tizzy over this.
O'DONNELL: Four days before Election Day and we're following two big stories that could impact voters.
BLITZER: Will it impact voters?
LAUER: Will it have an impact on the election?
O'BRIEN: How much of an impact do you think that's actually going to have on the election?
HARRIS: Is it early to gauge what kind of impact this will have?
RUSH: Well, my question is I thought the election was over. I thought the Democrats were going to win. I thought the Democrats had won this. Why, I just saw on PMSNBC that the brilliant Charlie Cook has now made his prediction official, 20 seats will be picked up by the Democrats next Tuesday. They will win 20 seats in the House. So they're in a frenzy on these two stories and what impact they'll have. Why do they need late-breaking stories? I thought the election was in the bag. By the way, one more thing on these New York Time docs, ladies and gentlemen. The left, when these documents were put up there -- and I think it was back in the spring -- when these documents were put up on this website, a bunch of people started poring over them, and the Democrats and the left started doubting their authenticity right off the bat. They pooh-poohed the release. Said, "These don't mean anything; how can we trust the translation?" Now they put it up there as gospel. But it's fascinating. Go to these liberal websites and to see their reaction to this. I guess everybody has their template. I guess everybody has their lens that they see things through, and there's not even any reason on the left, there's not even any logic. It's just pure raw emotional hatred. BREAK TRANSCRIPT
I also have to wonder about the New York Times in this. It is clear that by releasing this information, ladies and gentlemen, that they hope that what will dominate the discussion is the incompetence of the Bush administration the way they dealt with this, by putting it up there and allowing these secrets about how to build a nuke to permeate the entire blogosphere and the Internet, and who knows, Kim Jong ll could get it, oh! They want the whole discussion to center on how the Republicans in Congress forced this and how Bush went along with it and Bush is incompetent. What it actually does is it leads to a discussion of the substance of this stuff.
How can you miss this? Even if you're the Times editors. I guess you must be so confident that you have destroyed any credibility that the Bush administration might have had on its claim that Saddam posed a grave threat, an imminent threat. Well, this is an imminent threat. They think the whole discussion -- and there's no question, this is a November Surprise. This is trying to affect the outcome of the election. They must not be confident of it, either. They just so hate Bush, I mean, it's probably a combination of the two. But what the information in the story confirms is that there was a real reason for considering Saddam a huge threat and removing him. For crying out loud, if he was one year away and all of these documents indicate that, how can the Democrats continue to say that Bush lied?
That's another thing. They don't even see this part of it. They just see the clumsiness, they think, and the incompetence in the way the whole thing was handled because of the way these things were put up there on this website. And now they're, "See, the government admits its mistake because they've taken down the website now." But this is going to cause a discussion of the substance of this, not the handling of it, and that's, I think, a interesting point to watch in terms of how it affects real people, not the media, but real people who glom onto this story or hear it discussed. I went back to April 13th of this year, Salon.com, "Bush's Bogus Document Dump - The administration seeded its new public archive of Iraq documents with jihadist materials completely unrelated to Saddam." Now, I know not a whole lot of people read Salon.com, but liberals and the media do, and those kook fringe bloggers on the left do. Here comes the New York Times today, whoa ho-ho, it's just the exact opposite. Why, Saddam was very close to having nukes, and the New York Times is blaming the Bush administration for making this news available to everybody, because it contains some how-to-do-it materials. I remembered this, I wanted to call your attention to it because when these documents came out, when they were first posted, the liberals said, "They're bogus! There's nothing to it! All they do is prove that Bush went to Iraq for no reason whatsoever. There were no weapons of mass destruction." Now all of a sudden we learn Saddam's a year away from a nuke or an atomic bomb? Hello, Joe Wilson. Where are you Joe? I hear Joe Wilson and his wife are leaving Washington. They're moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, Santa Fe or Taos. I'm not sure. They're moving somewhere out there. You know, arts-and-croissant crowd. They're fed up. Their days of frolicking in the sunshine of public adulation apparently are over.
END TRANSCRIPT
