Cheney Puts Obama on Defensive

Cheney Puts Obama on Defensive

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RUSH: It has been a fascinating morning, ladies and gentlemen, dueling national security speeches by Fidel -- uh, Barack Obama. We got Castroed! We got Castroed by Fidel -- uh, Barack Obama. He just kept going and going and going. I have never seen President Obama as defensive as he was today. Greetings, my friends. The former titular head of the Republican Party Rush Limbaugh at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. Our telephone number if you want to join us today, 800-282-2882, and the e-mail address ElRushbo@eibnet.com. So I've been watching some of the commentary after we had Obama speak, and, folks, I felt like I was watching a Castro speech. It just went on and on and on and on and on and on and on. It was defensive as it could have been. I've never seen Obama this defensive. And I watched Cheney. And I watched some of the commentary afterwards, and the libs, the libs on all these cable networks are just foaming at the mouth over Cheney. Lawrence O'Donnell, the learned leftist who was a writer and consultant for The West Wing TV show, said Cheney's speech was as sleaziest speech since Spiro Agnew. Bob Beckel, our old buddy on Fox News I think has gone out and bought some shirts with larger collars because he gets so agitated on there, his neck swells up, looks like he's gonna just burst out of the shirt collar. These leftists are fit to be tied, and I'm thinking about the American people watching this stuff, I mean, you had two clear presentations here on national security, and nobody that I heard commenting on Cheney was angry about anything, commenting on Obama, was angry about anything, and I'm not going to be angry, just doing some analysis. But, boy these libs, these libs commenting after Cheney, are just foaming at the mouth. The rage and anger is palpable. And as I've always believed, I think one of the reasons why is that Cheney is effective. Cheney gets results. There's a poll out from CNN. His approval numbers are up. Cheney's numbers are up eight points since last week, since he started going public defending the Bush administration and defending the United States of America. I really thought that President Obama today was defensive. I keep saying this, I know, but I want to drill it home. One thing you can say about Club Gitmo, Guantanamo Bay, this is his exclusively. When you get to the US economy and the bailout, say, of the automobile companies and TARP, you know, Obama and his supporters could say that a lot of that started before he took office. So it's going to be tougher to tie economic results to Obama for a while although we're going to succeed in doing it. But Guantanamo Bay is a hundred percent Obama. Two days after he takes office he announced he's going to close it, he doesn't have any plan for closing it, his own party says no, we're not going to pay for that, no, we're not going to have to terrorists released into the United States said Dingy Harry. The Obama White House said, well, it was a hasty decision. They are really not coordinated on this. The White House yesterday says, "Our announcement to close Guantanamo was a hasty decision." Obama comes out there today defiant as hell, hell's bells, I'm closing the place. It was almost as though he was a lawyer, the perspective that I saw him adopt was as a lawyer making the case for terrorists and having access to the US court system, not making the case for terrorists and their actions, don't misunderstand me here, but he almost sounded as one who had to speak up in defense of the terrorists and their legal rights and how those legal rights had been bastardized and destroyed by the previous administration. I have never heard a president in a speech use the word "I" more than Obama did today, and I have never heard a president in a speech use the term "previous administration" more than Obama did today. Now, why was he defensive? I think I know. I know the personality type. Barack Obama has accomplished nothing. Barack Obama is where he is because of his perceived brain power. He's perceived to be smart and brilliant, a great speaker, but what's he ever done but organize a bunch of election fraud experts over at ACORN and pal around with some dubious characters. One of his best friends is a terrorist, in fact, Bill Ayers.

So he goes off to Harvard, he goes to Chicago law, he goes off to all these places, and gets rave reviews for his intellect and so forth. All of his adult life is spent in academia where nobody's challenged, nobody's challenged in academia. If the students challenge, it's the students that have a problem. Then he's out there organizing the ACORN election fraud experts, and he's out there teaching Saul Alinsky's book to them, Rules for Radicals. And now he's in government. He's in the Senate, now he's the president of the United States. And I think this guy is intolerant of challenge. I think his attitude, I think his essence is, don't challenge me, sort of a miniature messianic complex. You know, I say it and that's it, you don't challenge me. Well, he's being challenged, he's being challenged by Cheney, hence he has to go out and make this speech today. He in this speech repeated what he said yesterday. He said, "Make no mistake, let me be clear. I will not endanger US national security in any decision I make." Well, why do you have to say that unless there's some doubt about it, unless you think somebody has raised credible doubt about your intentions regarding national security? Why would you go out and have to make that clear? You cannot win wars with apologies. One of the things that Cheney said in his speech is, when terrorists see us divided, debating whether they should have constitutional rights, they don't stand back and reassess their opinion of us and say, "You know what, maybe we're wrong about the United States." What they see is weakness. Obama was all over the notion that Guantanamo Bay led to the creation and recruitment of more terrorists, ignoring the fact that we were repeatedly attacked by terrorists long before Guantanamo Bay was opened as a terrorist prison, ignoring the fact that, as Andy McCarthy pointed out to me in an e-mail, the number one terrorist recruitment tool is a successful terror attack. And there has not been a successful terrorist attack on the United States since 9/11, eight years, and the terrorists, we could say, suffered a defeat in Iraq. Then we have the story out of New York that these four guys who were converted to Islam while in US prisons -- see, here's another thing. Obama wants to bring all these people from Guantanamo Bay to prisons in the United States. He made the case, hey, we got terrorists here. We got Ramzi Yousef. We've got the blind sheik. We've got all these people in our prisons, and our prisons are safe; they're not escaping, they're not getting out. Well, these four guys were blithering idiots. I mean, they bought faulty, fake bombs from FBI informants but they were going to blow up a Jewish synagogue, a temple and some other things in New York. They got nabbed, and they were all converted to Islam in United States prisons. So he's making the case he's going to bring all these prisoners here, and Guantanamo is somehow immoral and unjust. But it was all so much on the defensive that it was stunning to watch for me. Because normally you see Obama as confident and self-assured and the chin up as he gazes out over the audience -- over it, not at it -- gazes out over the audience. There weren't a whole lot of applause lines in his speech. And he took after waterboarding, he made it plain -- we've got the sound bites. I don't know if I'm going to waste your time with them. Do you want to hear them, Snerdley? Do you really? Yeah, see, he wants to hear my reaction. Well, I guess that's true. Most everybody wants to hear my reaction more than the sound bites themselves, probably true, especially now that I am the former titular head of the GOP. But he went on the warpath here on waterboarding. They said it's torture. We're not going to torture. We've lost our moral values; we've lost our values, blah, blah, blah, blah. The methods of enhanced interrogations have been released by Obama. Obama has released to the terrorist community around the world our techniques, those memos. He has not released the content of the answers nor the results of the interrogation. Now, the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two others, just so you remember, folks, led to the successful obstruction of an attack on the city of Los Angeles. Every one of you in Los Angeles should know that had Barack Obama been president the last eight years, your city would have suffered a terrorist attack. Waterboarding saved an attack on Los Angeles. Now, if you're in Los Angeles, you can feel guilty or you can feel grateful. By using Obama's professed techniques and not using waterboarding and other things that he hit hard today, rest assured we would not have gotten the information that allowed us to thwart a terror attack on Los Angeles. Make no mistake about it, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad launching missiles that can reach Israel, they're ramping up their nukes.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I must confess, and let me be clear, these kinds of Obama speeches are getting old to me. And I frankly think the economy is crashing because of speeches like this. But as to the Obama speech itself, ultimately every speech Obama makes is about him, and this one was no exception. And that's because his followers all have a personal emotional investment in Obama. Obama knows it; he's got to fuel it. But I am here to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that only a charismatic demagogue -- highly skilled in the low art of political seduction -- would try to weave his personal story, talking about his two communist parents (that both abandoned him, by the way) into a discussion on national security. Let me say that again. Only a charismatic demagogue, highly skilled in the low art of political seduction, would try to weave his personal story into a speech or discussion about national security. As if Obama's personal story, misguided as it is, is the foundation for everything! And if you're a cult follower, and if you are an Obama supporter simply because of emotional investment, Obama knows that emotional investment has gotta be enforced. So he's gotta tell his personal story. How his father faced all these long odds in Kenya to go to here because this was the land of the free and the home of the brave and yada yada yada yada. What is it all meant to do? All of this is meant to say, "Hey, I am an American and I care about America." Now, if you're having to weave your personal story into a speech on national security when you are president of the United States, you are defensive. You are having to explain to people. For some reason in his own head he thinks there are people that doubt (this is Cheney's effectiveness) his bona fides and his credentials on national security. If it appeals to Obama personally, then it should appeal to all of his followers, including the slavish Drive-By Media. This is dangerous and it is tiresome. This low art of political seduction he practices is the height of narcissism. But I, ladies and gentlemen, believe that it's indicative of his leadership style. With Obama, everything is a tug and an appeal to popular sentiment, as opposed to substance and what it takes to keep the nation safe. Obama said today that terrorists captured on the battlefield should be given trials, full rights. Now, that's not going to play well if these people are released into various states. People in these states do not want people who have designs of blowing up people in the United States on this country's soil! Most people find nothing wrong with keeping these people at Guantanamo Bay. Had I been a terrorist, were I a terrorist I would have been prompted to give Obama's speech a standing O today. It would have been tempting to give him a standing ovation, because essentially Barack Obama apologized to terrorists all over the world for the past eight years of the previous administration. And then he goes on. He talked in this speech about this being a nation of laws. Very convenient for him to say! He cares not a whit about the law when it comes to taking over private sector businesses and putting private sector businesses out of business. The rule of law? It is his ignoring the rule of law that permits his domestic agenda.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: President Obama today kept talking about how the practices at Guantanamo Bay and the fact that it exists as a prison acted as "a recruitment tool" for terrorists around the world, and we know that the waterboarding of three of the terrorists down there helped to prevent -- or did prevent -- an attack on Los Angeles. So a logical question for those of you in Los Angeles would be this: "How much of a recruitment advantage or tool would a successful attack on Los Angeles have been after a successful attack on New York and Washington?" If they had hit Los Angeles after New York and Washington, what about that recruitment tool? Do you think they would have been able to recruit terrorists all over the world in far greater and far more numbers than because of the existence of Gitmo? And, by the way, they were recruiting terrorists and attacking Americans and America long before we opened Guantanamo Bay. Christian Science Monitor today with an interesting observation. Obama ran late today. Obama's speech was supposed to start at ten o'clock. Now, it's not uncharacteristic for Obama to run late, but they were 28 minutes late. "Obama took the stage nearly a half hour later than scheduled," and according to... This is Jimmy Orr at the Christian Science Monitor. "You could make the case Obama was trying to make it difficult on the networks to carry Cheney's speech afterwards, and I don't doubt that for a minute." I think it's a great observation. I think Obama was late. He didn't want the networks carrying Cheney's speech. They don't want Cheney to be heard. That's why they keep telling Cheney to shut up and go away. Let's listen to some of the great sound bites here from Vice President Cheney. Start with 37, and we'll just go in order there. This is the vice president on waterboarding. It's self-explanatory. Listen to it. CHENEY: It is a fact that only detainees of the highest intelligence value were ever subjected to enhanced interrogation. You've heard endlessly about waterboarding. It happened to three terrorists. One of them was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, who has also boasted about his beheading of Daniel Pearl. We had a lot of blind spots after the attacks on our country, things we didn't know about Al-Qaeda. We didn't know about Al-Qaeda's plans, but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a few others did know. And with many thousands of innocent lives potentially in the balance, we did not think it made sense to let the terrorists answer questions in their own good time, if they answered them at all. RUSH: Irrefutable logic, irrefutable logic. Why let them answer the questions on their time when they know what's coming next and what was coming next among other things was an attack on Los Angeles that was thwarted. One of the things that grates me -- and I have to tell you it grates me greatly -- is to hear Obama... He did this all during the campaign -- and, by the way, his speech today was just an extension of the campaign speech, his whole campaign. One of the things that constantly grates on me is how Obama talked about how Guantanamo Bay and our entire approach to terrorism somehow was a sacrifice of our values, that we had somehow lost our way, that we had lost our values, that we had not adhered to our values, that the moral beacon that was the United States disappeared in the seven years after 9/11 with Bush and Cheney in charge. Vice President Cheney dealt with that today. CHENEY: We hear from some quarters nothing but feigned outrage based on a false narrative. In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists. People who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about values. Intelligence officers of the United States were not trying to rough up some terrorists simply to avenge the dead of 9/11. We know the difference in this country between justice and vengeance. Intelligence officers were not trying to get terrorists to confess to past killings. They were trying to prevent future killings. To call this a program of torture is to libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims. What's more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation in the future is unwise in the extreme. It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness and would make the American people less safe.

RUSH: This sound bite is why I made the observation earlier that the Obama speech today was essentially an apology to terrorists. Because Cheney is sitting here saying, "To call this a program of torture is to libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims." And that has been the approach of the Democrats and President Obama for the last seven years: "These terrorists in Guantanamo are just innocent victims. Oh, poor people," and we have to run around in the world apologizing for all of this. So all of this talk on values that Obama professes is just empty rhetoric when compared to the substance of the success of the program to protect the country in the years after 9/11. One more. Well, not one more. Several more sound bites of Vice President Cheney. Here are his thoughts on the compromise between good and evil. CHENEY: The administration seems to pride itself on searching for some kind of middle ground in policies addressing terrorism. But in the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half measures keep you half exposed. You cannot keep just some nuclear-armed terrorists out of the United States. You must keep every nuclear-armed terrorist out of the United States. Triangulation is a political strategy, not a national security strategy. When just a single clue that goes unlearned or one lead that goes un-pursued can bring on catastrophe, it's no time for splitting differences. There is never a good time to compromise when the lives and safety of the American people hang in the balance. (applause) RUSH: Yeah. Right on, right on, right on, right on. One of the things that I have to observe, I found Cheney's speech to be compelling. I found Obama's speech to be extraordinarily defensive. Obviously you people are going to think I have a bias about this. If I have a bias it's toward the truth. If I have a bias it's toward love of country. If I have a bias, it's love of freedom. And there clearly are differing approaches to securing freedom and securing national security, and the current crop of people come up way short on both counts, in my opinion as an adult and as an observer. Here is Cheney commenting on Obama's hasty decision to close Guantanamo Bay. CHENEY: On his second day in office, President Obama announced he was closing the detention facility at Guantanamo. This step came with little deliberation and no plan. Now the president says some of these terrorists should be brought to American soil for trial in our court system. Others, he says, will be shipped to third countries. But so far the United States has had little luck getting other countries to take hardened terrorists. So what happens then? On this one I find myself in complete agreement with many in the president's own party. RUSH: (laughing) He went on to say how they don't want them out of Gitmo; they don't want to transfer them here to the United States. It was just wonderful to hear the vice president today, and a lot of people, I've checked my e-mail, are saying, "Where was this during the Bush administration? Why didn't they speak up and say this kind of thing when they were in the midst of these personal attacks and assaults?" I don't know. I can't answer it. But nevertheless it's happening now. Cheney's poll numbers are rising. Dick Cheney is getting results. For all that Obama said today, almost every national security policy from the Bush administration is being continued by Obama. Do you want me to list a couple of them for you? A couple of them are increasing troop strength in Afghanistan. We're not getting out of there. He's holding onto the warrantless wiretap program, or warrantless searches and wiretaps of foreign terrorists. He is reserving for himself, Obama is, the right to do enhanced interrogation techniques. He said that in his speech today. He's reserving the right while ripping the previous administration. Obama, folks, I'm going to tell you something. It was never more clear to me than today. They say he's cool. He's not. He's cooled, and this guy is angry. This guy has a chip on his shoulder. He is angry that anybody dares challenge him as president on any decision he makes or any speech he makes. He's angry that anybody dares challenge him on his policies. And he has a partisan anger directed at Bush and Cheney and Republicans that he mostly manages to keep beneath the surface. But a speech like he made today that's defensive, it came roaring into plain view by everybody. We've got sound bites. I'll let you hear some of them as the program unfolds. Here are a couple more before we go to the break, Vice President Cheney explaining the "recruitment tool" theory. CHENEY: Another term out there that slipped into the discussion is the notion that American interrogation practices were a, quote, "recruitment tool" for the enemy. On this theory, by the tough questioning of killers, we have supposedly fallen short of our own values. This recruitment tool theory has become something of a mantra lately, including from the president himself. And after a familiar fashion, it excuses the violent and blames America for the evil that others do. It's another version of that same old refrain from the left: "We brought it on ourselves." RUSH: Amen, and nothing could be more compelling and nothing could be more truthful. This is the essence of the Democrat Party position: "Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, that created terrorists. That made them hate us even more. It's our fault. We are to blame. We brought it on ourselves. Blame America first," and when you get one of those people as president, the blame-America-first guy then runs around the world and not only blames America, but apologizes for it. And all of this is done under the guise of enhancing the respect nations have for us around the world. It does no such thing. It just displays our weakness, and it causes people who intend us harm to laugh at us, at the sophistry and the silliness of people like Obama. Final bite. Cheney nuking it here. CHENEY: Critics of our policies are given to lecturing on the theme of being consistent with American values, but no moral value held dear by the American people obliges public servants to sacrifice innocent lives to spare a captured terrorist from unpleasant things -- and when an entire population is targeted by a terror network, nothing is more consistent with American values than to stop them. RUSH: Amen.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Now, we've told you all about Obama's speech, and you've heard a lot of Vice President Cheney's reaction to it today. You've heard that Barack Obama basically apologized to terrorists for the last eight years, said we're not going to do this again, we're not going to suffer moral lapses like we did. We're going to do -- blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the New York Times today has a fascinating story on page A-18: "President Obama told human rights advocates at the White House on Wednesday that he was mulling the need for a 'preventive detention' system that would establish a legal basis for the United States to incarcerate terrorism suspects who are deemed a threat to national security but cannot be tried, two participants in the private session said. ... The two participants, outsiders who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the session was intended to be off the record, said they left the meeting dismayed. ... 'He was almost ruminating over the need for statutory change to the laws so that we can deal with individuals who we can't charge and detain.'" Can I translate this for you, page A-18, the New York Times? Barack Obama wants statutory right to go out and say, "We think you're going to blow us up," and put you in prison, before you've done a thing, before you have committed one act. This is called preventive detention. So while making this speech today, he's telling human rights people yesterday in the White House in an off-the-record talk that wasn't supposed to get out, but it did get out, even though it got buried on page A-18 of the New York Times. So essentially everything Obama said today was BS and smoke and mirrors designed to defend himself and to continue to tell his personal story and to establish his bona fides and so forth and to rip the Bush administration, to rip conservatives, to rip Republicans, to rip the United States while he's out there looking for preventive detention and the need for it. Later in the article -- Jane Mayer wrote a piece about this in the New Yorker about what this might look like. And she said that White House Counsel Greg Craig was looking at whether the number of hard cases, suspects who may be difficult to convict under American legal standards of justice -- under American values -- but who may pose a threat if released might require preventive detention laws. I know we have it. It's called Guantanamo Bay, which he wants to close. That's simply closing the loop on his campaign with his leftist buddies, the unions and everything else. Folks, I'm telling you, this is striking. It's just stunning. Greg Craig, the White House counsel, looking at whether a number of hard cases, suspects who may be difficult to convict under our legal standards -- our values -- but who may pose a threat if released might require preventive detention laws. This thinking goes beyond the Guantanamo Bay detainees. The difficulties Obama is having shutting down Guantanamo, perhaps his daily intelligence briefings must be leaving him with more hard cases than he thought. This is from the Hot Air blog. So it's just amazing. This guy says things in public that are in direct contradiction to the things he's telling people in private and to the things that he's doing -- well, you could say it's incoherent. It's not incoherent. This is studied low art of political seduction. This is convincing a bunch of Americans that he is going to be righteous and protect American values when in fact he's turning into a -- into a -- I'm having a mental block on the word 'cause I'm being restrained. But all I'm telling you is it looks incoherent because it's not at all similar what he's saying in public, what he's saying in private. What he's saying in public is designed to let him get away with what he's doing in private with nobody knowing it. In other words, he's not what he says he is, which is my whole point. Pay no attention to what he says, because it's how he says it that has gotten him to where he is.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Andrea Mitchell -- NBC News, Washington -- is on television right now talking about how long the speeches were today. Obama's, I'm telling you, we got "Castroed." Some people thought I said "castrated" in the first hour. I wanted to clarify this. We got "Castroed." Just wandered on and on and on and on and on and on, it's about him, and him and his father and how his personal story is woven into national security. All right, people have been waiting patiently on the phones so that's what we're going to do, take a phone call. We go to Whidbey Island in Washington. Barbara, nice to have you on the EIB Network. Hello. CALLER: Hi, Rush. I'm so happy and proud to be talking to you. It's the first time I've ever called and actually gotten through. RUSH: You're very lucky. That doesn't happen to many Americans. CALLER: (laughing) I know. RUSH: There are people out there been trying to get in for 20 years who haven't made it. CALLER: (laughing) It was meant to be. And your last statement that you said, "We got 'Castroed,' not castrated"? Well, let me just say that the only person that got castrated today was Barack Obama, and Dick Cheney had the knife. (giggles) RUSH: You know, I just love it when women talk this way. I don't know why. CALLER: (laughing) RUSH: (laughing) I don't know why, but I -- CALLER: You know, I have always been a proud American, but today for the first time I think this was Dick Cheney's finest hour because, besides you, he spoke for me. He spoke for the way I feel. He was not only compelling but he was gutsy. He wasn't defiant; he wasn't defensive. He was on the offense. And I just absolutely loved the part where he was talking about the little "man-caused disasters" and the overseas contingency plan. It was so great it happened; it was like what he was saying was, "Look, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck." (chuckles) But the way he said it was just riveting. I actually started to mist up when he started to talk about 9/11 and the reasoning behind what the Bush administration did, because there's going to come a day when Obama and the liberals are going to have to stop blaming George Bush for this.

RUSH: Well, when is that day going to be? CALLER: I hope it's soon, but -- RUSH: I know, but what's going to facilitate it? What's going to be the catalyst or the event that does it? See, I think you're wrong. I think if there's another hit, if there's another hit, guess what? All of this is to set up blaming Bush and Cheney for the next hit. Because, if you listen to Obama with this nonsense that Guantanamo Bay was a recruitment tool for Al-Qaeda terrorists, nothing could be further from the truth. CALLER: That's true. RUSH: They were recruiting before we opened Guantanamo Bay. We got hit by them before Guantanamo Bay. The number one recruitment tool for them is a successful attack. 9/11 itself was the giant recruitment tool. There has not been an attack on our soil since. But they're running around setting all this up so that torture and suspension of rights causes it. They're going to get away or try to get away with blaming Bush if there is another attack. It remains to be seen if they succeed with that, but I know that that's what their intent is. CALLER: I think, actually, the blame-Bush is actually showing signs of starting to fail. I live here in Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island. We're proud host of the naval air station and we're retired Navy, and there's two islands. The island is like 47 miles long. Well, the north half of the island is pretty conservative but the south-half part of the island is very, very left wing. And there's like an underground up here. We can't... We have to be careful what we say, as to who we talk to. RUSH: Yeah? CALLER: And I think that Dick Cheney today, I actually feel now, because I'm a graphic designer and photographer. So I have clients here on the island, and most of my clients right now are left-wing grants from the county, you know, the department of ecology and things like that. RUSH: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. CALLER: And every time I go to one of these -- RUSH: I know the type you're talking about. CALLER: Oh, yeah. RUSH: They run around, "Call me! I'm looking for a grant to do this. I'm looking for a grant to do that." Why don't you go get a job? CALLER: Exactly. Well, the thing is, is that at every one of these meetings, it is inevitable that somebody brings up the Bush administration, Dick Cheney, Guantanamo Bay. RUSH: It's formulaic, it's formulation. Barbara, you're dealing with emotions. You're not dealing with rational thought and to react to them that way is going to be very, very frustrating. Obama, you say he thinks he's losing. I think Obama is just outraged that Cheney is out there speaking at all and challenging him. I think that's what it is. You don't challenge The Messiah! You just don't do it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: By the way, E.J. Dionne Jr. today in the Washington Post is all upset. He thinks that Cheney has successfully distracted Obama from health care and the economy and that the Obama agenda has been tripped up by the libs going after Cheney and Cheney firing back on defense and Guantanamo Bay. E.J. thinks that they're succumbing to the bait that Cheney's putting out there and distracting Obama from the truly wonderful things he has in mind for us with the economy. Of course, the Federal Reserve today, as I reported earlier, has reported the forecast for the US economy is worse than it was three months ago.

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