« Hurricane Charley Is the Least of Their Worries | Main | Planet of the Apes Explained »
August 18, 2004
Another Rant on Rush
Why? Because I can--and because it bugs me that I used to think this guy was a (at least semi-)serious conservative.
On Tuesday's show, a female caller from Punta Gorda, Florida, expressed her gratitude for the president's apperance in the area after the hurricane. After saying that she "was like, 'Praise God, I am so glad he's coming,'" when she heard Bush was on his way, the conversation continued as follows:
RUSH: But have you heard anybody say who was there that President Bush impeded or got in the way of or delayed the recovery effort by showing up?
CALLER: No way. I think because of his attention that we've gotten a recovery effort so organized in such a short period of time because of his interest and because of Jeb Bush's interest, and the fact that they're brothers. Our governor was able to call his brother, the president. We have got more people down there helping us right now, you know, getting the lines back up. I mean every single power line is down, every one of them. You know, there's no water. There's nothing. And we have got the most organized recovery effort going right now, and I believe that that's because President Bush loves us, cares about us, and cared enough to come down --
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: -- and see it firsthand. I mean, he didn't sit in his office and wait for someone to say, "Oh, you know, you need to go down there."
RUSH: Wait. You didn't have any doubt that he would show up, did you? I mean this is something he couldn't miss.
CALLER: No --
Now we all know that every time Bill Clinton showed up at a disaster site, Rush would excoriate him (and rightly so) for feigning to care about the victims and using the disaster for political purposes; but when it's Bush, Rush agrees with the caller that he really cares about the people he's visiting--people he doesn't know from Adam (Clymer).
In fact, Rush picked up his old punching bag and started beating him around again:
RUSH: The interesting thing to me, the interesting thing to me is that Kerry didn't go, I thought he would go. As I said if it were Clinton, Clinton would have been out there on the beach acting like Moses trying to stop the hurricane from coming ashore. That's where Clinton would have been. Bush waits, lets the governor handle this the first couple days then goes down there.
And this is the guy whose bumper quote says, "With Rush, principle still matters." Riiiiiight.
By the way, Rush also says the war in Iraq is actually a war against Iran, with Iraq as a proxy much as Grenada, Nicaragua, et al., were mere proxies for the Soviet Union.
Posted by Mike Tennant at August 18, 2004 01:04 PM