Complete transcript here - his comment was made specifically after the caller mentioned plural soldiers - take it for what you want. I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to note plurals, context, etc., unless you feel the need to massage something. I listened to the exact call in question. I heard it that day, live, happened to be listening to his show at that moment, I heard the reference, the voice inflexions, etc. But here it is - I love the earlier reference to not being able to follow intellectually "these people." A lot of pluralities and generalities put forth by Rush here. (By the way, I have heard two reports that he doctored that very transcript before airing on Armed Forces Radio - will look for verification of that.
>>The transcript can be found at The Rush Limbaugh website:
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RUSH: Mike in Chicago, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush, how you doing today?
RUSH: Fine, sir, thank you.
CALLER: Good. Why is it that you always just accuse the Democrats of being against the war and that there's actually no Republicans that can possibly be against the war?
RUSH: Well, who are these Republicans? I can think of Chuck Hagel, and I can think of Gordon Smith, two Republican senators, but they don't want to lose the war like the Democrats do. I can't think of who the Republicans are in the anti-war movement.
CALLER: I'm not talking about the senators. I'm talking about the general public. You accuse the public and all the Democrats of being, you know, wanting to lose --
RUSH: Oh, come on, here we go again. I utter the truth, and you can't handle it so you gotta call here and change the subject. How come I'm not also hitting Republicans? I don't know a single Republican or conservative, Mike, who wants to pull out of Iraq in defeat. The Democrats have made the last four years about that specifically.
CALLER: Well, I am a Republican, and I listened to you for a long time, and you're right on a lot of things, but I do believe that we should pull out of Iraq. I don't think it's winnable. I'm not a Democrat, but sometimes you gotta cut the losses. I mean, sometimes you really got to admit you're wrong.
RUSH: Well, yeah, you do. I'm not wrong on this. The worst thing that can happen is losing this, getting out of there, waving the white flag.
CALLER: I'm not saying that, I'm not saying anything like that.
RUSH: Of course you are.
CALLER: No, I'm not!
RUSH: The truth is the truth, Mike.
CALLER: We did what we were supposed to do, okay, we got rid of Saddam Hussein; we got rid of a lot of the terrorists. Let them run their country now. Let's get out of there and let's be done with it. We won it.
RUSH: I'm never going to be able to retire. It's not going to work. You are depressing me.
CALLER: Well, sometimes, like you said, the truth hurts, Rush. Sometimes it hurts.
RUSH: I have explained this so many times. I can't believe that you actually listen to this program a lot, because you've heard me say what I'm going to say to you. War is never "plottable" on a piece of paper or on a map. It never goes exactly as anybody thinks it's going to go because nobody can predict the future, for one thing.
CALLER: That's true.
RUSH: Thank you. So what's happening now is that the very enemy that blew us up on 9/11 is facing us in Iraq. We can't cave in defeat and run out of there and say, "Hey guess what, we won, we got Saddam." We are going to be setting ourselves up for future disasters. We will never be able to have any other nation trust us as an ally when we have to go in there again. If we pull out of there before we take care of this, Mike, we're just going to have to do it sometime later at greater cost.
CALLER: Are we ever going to take care of it, though? How long do you think we're going to have to be there to take care of it?
RUSH: Mike, you can't possibly be a Republican.
CALLER: I am.
RUSH: You can't be Republican.
CALLER: Oh, I am definitely Republican.
RUSH: You sound just like a Democrat.
CALLER: No, but seriously, Rush, how long do we have to stay there?
RUSH: As long as it takes.
CALLER: How long?
RUSH: As long as it takes. It is very serious. This is the United States of America at war with Islamofascists. Just like your job, you do everything you have to do, whatever it takes to get it done, if you take it seriously.
CALLER: So then you say we need to stay there forever?
RUSH: No, Bill -- (Laughing) or Mike. I'm sorry. I'm confusing you with the guy from Texas.
CALLER: I used to be military, okay, and I am a Republican.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: And I do listen to you, but --
RUSH: Right, I know. And I, by the way, used to walk on the moon.
CALLER: How long do we have to stay there?
RUSH: You're not listening to what I say. You can't possibly be a Republican. I'm answering every question; it's not what you want to hear, and so it's not even penetrating your little wall of armor you've got built up. I said we stay to get the job done, as long as it takes. I didn't say forever. Nothing takes forever. That's not possible, Bill. Mike. Whatever. Nobody lives forever, no situation lasts forever, everything ends. We determine how do we want it to end, in our favor or in our defeat? With people like you in charge, who want to put a timeline on everything -- do you ever get anything done in your life? Or do you say, "Well, I wanted to have this done by now, and it's not, so screw it"? You don't live your life that way. Well, hell, you might, I don't know. But the limitations that you want to impose here are senseless, and they, frankly, portray no evidence that you are a Republican.
Another Mike. This one in Olympia, Washington. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: I have a retort to Mike in Chicago, because I am serving in the American military, in the Army. I've been serving for 14 years, very proudly.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I'm one of the few that joined the Army to serve my country, I'm proud to say, not for the money or anything like that. What I would like to retort to is that, what these people don't understand, is if we pull out of Iraq right now, which is not possible because of all the stuff that's over there, it would take us at least a year to pull everything back out of Iraq, then Iraq itself would collapse and we'd have to go right back over there within a year or so.
RUSH: There's a lot more than that that they don't understand. The next guy that calls here I'm going to ask them, "What is the imperative of pulling out? What's in it for the United States to pull out?" I don't think they have an answer for that other than, "When's he going to bring the troops home? Keep the troops safe," whatever.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: It's not possible intellectually to follow these people.
CALLER: No, it's not. And what's really funny is they never talk to real soldiers. They pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and spout to the media.
RUSH: The phony soldiers.
CALLER: Phony soldiers. If you talk to any real soldier and they're proud to serve, they want to be over in Iraq, they understand their sacrifice and they're willing to sacrifice for the country.
RUSH: They joined to be in Iraq.
CALLER: A lot of people.
RUSH: You know where you're going these days, the last four years, if you sign up. The odds are you're going there or Afghanistan, or somewhere.
CALLER: Exactly, sir. My other comment, my original comment, was a retort to Jill about the fact we didn't find any weapons of mass destruction. Actually, we have found weapons of mass destruction in chemical agents that terrorists have been using against us for a while now. I've done two tours in Iraq, I just got back in June, and there are many instances of insurgents not knowing what they're using in their IEDs. They're using mustard artillery rounds, VX artillery rounds in their IEDs. Because they didn't know what they were using, they didn't do it right, and so it didn't really hurt anybody. But those munitions are over there. It's a huge desert. If they bury it somewhere, we're never going to find it.
RUSH: Well, that's a moot point for me right now.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: The weapons of mass destruction. We gotta get beyond that. We're there. We all know they were there, and Mahmoud even admitted it in one of his speeches here talking about Saddam using the poison mustard gas or whatever it is on his own people. But that's moot. What's more important is all this is taking place now in the midst of the surge working, and all of these anti-war Democrats are getting even more hell-bent on pulling out of there, which means that success on the part of you and your colleagues over there is a great threat to them. It's frustrating and maddening, and why they must be kept in the minority. I want to thank you, Mike, for calling. I appreciate it very much.
Here is a Morning Update that we did recently, talking about fake soldiers. This is a story of who the left props up as heroes. They have their celebrities and one of them was Army Ranger Jesse Macbeth. Now, he was a "corporal." I say in quotes. Twenty-three years old. What made Jesse Macbeth a hero to the anti-war crowd wasn't his Purple Heart; it wasn't his being affiliated with post-traumatic stress disorder from tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. No. What made Jesse Macbeth, Army Ranger, a hero to the left was his courage, in their view, off the battlefield, without regard to consequences. He told the world the abuses he had witnessed in Iraq, American soldiers killing unarmed civilians, hundreds of men, women, even children. In one gruesome account, translated into Arabic and spread widely across the Internet, Army Ranger Jesse Macbeth describes the horrors this way: "We would burn their bodies. We would hang their bodies from the rafters in the mosque."
Now, recently, Jesse Macbeth, poster boy for the anti-war left, had his day in court. And you know what? He was sentenced to five months in jail and three years probation for falsifying a Department of Veterans Affairs claim and his Army discharge record. He was in the Army. Jesse Macbeth was in the Army, folks, briefly. Forty-four days before he washed out of boot camp. Jesse Macbeth isn't an Army Ranger, never was. He isn't a corporal, never was. He never won the Purple Heart, and he was never in combat to witness the horrors he claimed to have seen. You probably haven't even heard about this. And, if you have, you haven't heard much about it. This doesn't fit the narrative and the template in the Drive-By Media and the Democrat Party as to who is a genuine war hero. Don't look for any retractions, by the way. Not from the anti-war left, the anti-military Drive-By Media, or the Arabic websites that spread Jesse Macbeth's lies about our troops, because the truth for the left is fiction that serves their purpose. They have to lie about such atrocities because they can't find any that fit the template of the way they see the US military. In other words, for the American anti-war left, the greatest inconvenience they face is the truth.
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