[Update] Text of Clear Channel, CEO's letter in response to Harry Reid.
[Update] 10/2/07-This was left in the comment section of this post and I am putting it on top--
I am a soldier in the U.S. Army. I served for a year in Iraq. Senator Reid, where are these "thousands" of soldiers who oppose the war? I didn't meet them in uniform. I submit, Senator Reid, that they are a product of your putrid imagination -- phantom, phony soldiers indeed.
Senator Reid, the thing about this war that frustrates us soldiers more than anything else are the intentional, malicious and subversive efforts by you and your cronies to undercut our mission. You, Senator Reid, are a far more virulent enemy of the United States than anything we have confronted in Iraq. We can deal directly with the enemies we face in combat. Be thankful that we have to deal with you through more civil means. (John Breland)
The troops know who supports them and who doesn't. [End Update] (This has been added to all relevant posts)
[Update] 9/29/07- I updated this and bumped it with portions of Rush Limbaughs "The Anatomy of a Smear: "Phony Soldiers" Is a Phony Story".
I waited to post about this because I wanted to be able to see the whole transcript instead of the cherry picked portions the left used to get their readers all up in arms.
The transcript can be found at The Rush Limbaugh website:
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
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.
END TRANSCRIPT
Makes a little more sense with the reference to Jesse Macbeth which we recently showed that he was, indeed, a "phony soldier" and that was the portion that the left, and the Democratic politicians, conveniently left out of their little narratives yesterday. (Although had the context not been provided, I was ready to rip Rush a new one and I still think he could have made it a little clearer that he was referring to the Macbeth's of the anti-war lefts world)
No one claims that there are not soldiers against our actions in Iraq but their numbers do not compare to the active military speaking up in support of the mission, their numbers do not compare to the numbers of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans that are in support of the mission and their numbers do not come close to comparing to the veterans that support the troops and their mission.
When the anti-war left can start producing those kinds of numbers, then perhaps they will be given more credibility to their arguments.
VETERANS;
The American Legion:
The American Legion was chartered by Congress in 1919 as a patriotic, mutual-help, war-time veterans organization. A community-service organization which now numbers nearly 3 million members -- men and women -- in nearly 15,000 American Legion Posts worldwide. These Posts are organized into 55 Departments -- one each for the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, France, Mexico, and the Philippines.
The American Legion's national headquarters is in Indianapolis,Indiana, with additional offices in Washington, DC. In addition to thousands of volunteers serving in leadership and program implementation capacities in local communities to the Legion's standing national commissions and committees, the national organization has a regular full-time staff of about 300 employees.
They represent three million veterans and here are a couple of their statements.
RENO, NV, August 31, 2007, American Legion Reaffirms Support for War on Terror.
Nearly 6,000 delegates unanimously re-affirmed The American Legion’s support for the war on terrorism during the organization’s 89th National Convention in Reno, Nevada.
“We must continue to stand by the president and advocate for adequate funding for our troops that is not contingent on a set date for troop withdrawal,” said National Commander Paul A. Morin. “Our support of Resolution 169 is unwavering.”
Resolution 169 was first passed at The American Legion’s 87th National Convention in Honolulu and re-affirmed last year in Salt Lake City. It resolves that The American Legion urges all Americans and freedom-loving people stand united in their support of the global war on terrorism and united in their support of the troops. It further resolves that national commander of The American Legion disseminate accurate information to ensure the united support of the American people.
The American Legion, which by its own constitution is nonpartisan, urges that the people support both the president who sent the troops to war and Congress, which authorized the action.
Several speakers at The American Legion National Convention pointed out that the current strategy in Iraq appears to be working. “Tired of the indiscriminate violence and turned off by al-Qaeda’s Taliban-like ideology, many sheiks, tribes and local citizens are rejecting al-Qaeda,” said Gen. David Petraeus, who addressed the convention from a videotape produced in Iraq. He added that troops have been aided enormously by “the increasing assistance of everyday Iraqis.”
WASHINGTON, D.C., September 11, 2007, Legion: Support Surge, Troops, Petraeus.
The National Commander of the nation’s largest veterans organization today called for “much resolve and patience” by Congress and the American people on the war in Iraq after Multi-National Force Iraq Commander Gen. David Petraeus’s testimony before Congress.Add to that the Gathering of Eagles and Rolling Thunder.
National Commander Marty Conatser voiced The American Legion's continued support for the "surge" in Iraq and the improving security environment.
"Gen. Petraeus forcefully and effectively reported measurable gains to the joint session of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees and his honest and professional assessment reinforced what I had seen in Iraq in the last month," Conatser said.
"General Petraeus's assessment that the military objectives are in large measure being met plus his reasonable proposal for a troop draw down prove the wisdom of the “surge” strategy,” Conatser explained.
He also applauded Gen. Petraeus's view that failure to follow through would be a ‘"rush to failure."’
“I visited Iraq in August and met with troops and Gen. Petraeus,” Conatser said. “There is no doubt in my mind, a premature troop withdrawal from Iraq would be disastrous for the Iraqis and the United States.”
Conatser said the troops he spoke with there said they’ve seen significant change and real improvements in the security environment, echoing what Gen. Petraeus told Congress today.
“The Senate confirmed Gen. Petraeus to change direction in Iraq,” Conatser added. “He’s doing that but change does not happen overnight and his “surge” strategy just became fully implemented in mid-June when the requested reinforcements finally arrived.
“In the broader context, this report to the Congress today demonstrates progress in the global war on terrorism,” the national commander said. “We agree with the Multi-Nation Force Iraq Commander that this will be a long struggle but we support our nation's forces and their leadership for the long haul.”
Two weeks ago, The American Legion unanimously re-affirmed The American Legion’s unwavering support for the war on terrorism during the organization’s 89th National Convention in Reno, Nevada. Resolution 169 also points out that the United States was “suddenly and without provocation, attacked by terrorists on September 11, 2001.” It adds, “The global war on terrorism is a just war, aimed at protecting the very foundations of freedom and freedom-loving people everywhere.”
Conatser, a retired sergeant major with the Illinois National Guard, fully supports Resolution 169.
“I am proud that The American Legion passed Resolution 169, which reminds people that supporting the troops also means supporting their mission. Iraq is part of the Global War on Terrorism. I always believed that but after seeing it firsthand, I am more convinced than ever,” he said. “Everything I saw in Iraq last month points to the fact that the “surge” is working.”
The National Commander also addressed recent personal attacks on Iraq’s top military commander.
“For anyone or group to portray Gen. Petraeus as a traitor is outrageous and downright despicable,” Conatser said. “The military leader I met with is an honest, dedicated patriot who is succeeding given the very difficult mission before him. He should be commended not condemned for his 35 years of selfless service to our nation.”
With a membership of 2.7-million wartime veterans, The American Legion was founded in 1919 on the four pillars of a strong national security, veterans affairs, Americanism, and patriotic youth programs. Legionnaires work for the betterment of their communities through more than 14,000 posts across the nation.
Challenge to the anti-war left: Produce any organization that represents 3 million veterans as we have just produced.
IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN VETERANS;
Vets For Freedom:
Vets for Freedom is a nonpartisan organization established by combat veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our mission is to educate the American public about the importance of achieving success in these conflicts by applying our first-hand knowledge to issues of American strategy and tactics—namely "the surge" in Iraq. We support policymakers from both sides of the aisle who have stood behind our great generation of American warriors on the battlefield, and who have put long-term national security before short-term partisan political gain.
Vets for Freedom is the leading voice representing troops and veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Vets for Freedom represent more than 7,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Here are there news articles and press releases.
Challenge to the anti-war left: Produce any organization that represents over 7,000 IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN veterans. Veterans that have fought in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
ACTIVE MILITARY;
Appeal for Courage:
Appeal for Courage is a non-partisan, grass-roots effort to communicate to Congress the troops' desire to remain in Iraq until our mission is complete. We feel calls to retreat embolden our enemy and hurt our support within the American public and Iraqi people. We accept no funding from any source, and do not speak for any group or organization other than those military members who have signed the Appeal.
3285 Active Military Members have signed this appeal.
As an American currently serving my nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to fully support our mission in Iraq and halt any calls for retreat. I also respectfully urge my political leaders to actively oppose media efforts which embolden my enemy while demoralizing American support at home. The War in Iraq is a necessary and just effort to bring freedom to the Middle East and protect America from further attack.
Challenge to the anti-war left: Produce 3285 Active Military Members speaking up publicly against the mission.
The far left liberal anti-war, anti-military will jump on one, two or ten, military members that has fought in Iraq and some of them, such as Jesse Macbeth are, indeed, as Rush stated, phony soldiers... others are soldiers that have served and simply disagree with our actions in Iraq and the ones that DID serve deserve the respect of being listened to, but, they receive no more credibility than the thousands that are speaking up in favor of our missions, in Iraq or elsewhere.
When you have 10 or 20 or even a hundred that are telling you one thing and you compare that to thousands that are telling you something else, you must use common sense.
Why would anybody give more credence to hundreds than they would thousands?
It makes no sense at all and yet that is what the anti-war left does on a daily basis.
What the left has done with Rush Limbaugh's comments is exactly what they have done with their use of the soldiers they trumpet the words of.
The deliberately hide the "context".
More from Hot Air, Right Wing News, Take Our Country Back and Captain's Quarters.
Open trackbacks over at Stop the ACLU.
Tracked back by:
Going Phishing: Limbaugh and "Phony Soldiers" from Burkean Reflections...
“Phony Airman” Comes Out Of The Closet: Rush Limbaugh’s “Phony Soldiers̶ from The Gun Toting Liberal..
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