I don't get to listen to Rush much anymore. But an online buddy (Cormac) sends me transcripts when he thinks something is interesting and I thought this was very interesting (but kind of long). So here is part of Rush from Friday April 14th:
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Yesterday afternoon at the conclusion of yesterday's program, I went over to a local theater to watch a private screening of United 93. I invited some people to go with me, and a number of them didn't want to go because they were just afraid it would knock 'em out, and you've heard some of the complaints from the theaters that have shown the trailer to this movie, the Upper West Side of New York and other places around the country. "No, no! It's too soon! It's too soon! I can't bear it!" It's not "too soon." If anything, it's too late. I wish this movie had been out two or three years ago. Now, I'm not a movie critic, and I have to be careful here that in describing it, I don't give it away. What can you give away? You all know what happens.
That's the thing. This movie is real. It portrays actual events and it tries to duplicate them as closely as possible. So when you watch this - it's about an hour-40 minutes, hour-45 - when you watch this you know what's going to happen at every stage. Well, you know what's going to happen at areas you know. Some of the behind the scenes things that are portrayed in the movie you'll see for the first time, and I don't know how accurate those are. For example, the North American Defense Command out of Rome, New York, the military up there that's designed to identify rogue aircraft entering our space is actually portrayed as bumbling incompetents, unable to keep track of domestic airliners when they've turned their transponders off. They're issuing orders all over the place, and nobody is getting anything done.
They scramble a couple of F-16s, but they don't have any weapons on them, and they send the F-16s out over the Atlantic Ocean thinking that more hijacked international airlines are coming in rather than chase the hijacked airlines westward, and the air traffic control people, they're portrayed... The whole movie is powerful. I think there's not that much gore in it. A lot of people that I invited didn't want to go because they're just afraid of the gore. There isn't that much. There's some, but there isn't that much. There's a piece of footage of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center that I had not seen before, and it looks like this footage was shot from across the river, like maybe the control tower at Newark International Airport.
This one shows the speed with which that second plane hit the tower, and it looks like it's barreling along. You don't see planes flying this fast this low normally, not civilian airliners. I guess the focus of the movie and the people on Flight 93, United Flight 93, and without giving too much away here, one of the things I told people who asked, "What did you think of it?" Well, it's tough today, in 2006, not to watch this movie within the prism of your own political opinions and attitudes about life in the country today. I think people will have a different perception of this if they had watched this movie, which would be impossible to do, but a couple or three days after it, or even six months after it had happened. But there's been a lot of years that have passed, and in that time a lot of events have happened regarding the war on terror that have shaped political opinion in this country in wide and diverse ways.
For example, it is my opinion that the kook-fringe left, after watching this movie, will come away blaming Bush all over again, despite the fact that the overwhelming emotion I had was sheer anger at the terrorists, bordering on hatred. I was gripping the arms of my seat, my chair. They are not portrayed sympathetically, and that's important. I have seen a lot of movies made in the last couple years. I forget the name of this movie, but Jodie Foster was in it, and her daughter was hijacked from her on board an airplane and there were four Arabs on board, and she was convinced they were the guilty ones, and they were holding her daughter hostage.
None of the crew would help her find her daughter. The Arab looking guys ended up being the angels. They were honest. They were the great ones and the conspirators and the bad guys were the pilot, copilot and a flight attendant. This movie is not that. This movie does not portray the hijackers sympathetically. You will not like these people, and that's important, and I think that's the reaction the vast majority of people who watch the movie are going to have. The reason I say the kook-fringe left will be able to blame Bush - "See? Bush is incompetent" - because of one passage in the movie.
The air traffic control people, or the national air - I'm not sure if was air traffic control or... it's something to do with the FAA. The head of this organization is trying to get hold of the president or vice president to authorize military jets to go up and shoot these hijacked planes down, and he comes in, his chief aide comes in, and says, "I can't find the president. We can't get hold of him. We don't know where the vice president is." So it appears that on the morning of these attacks the president and vice president are nowhere to be found. Well, we know the president was in Tampa, and he was in a classroom with some school kids, and we know that that has been lampooned by the left in Michael Moore's whatever you want to call that piece of propaganda.
So the left will say, shallow as they are, kooky as they are, and as off-the-deep-end as they are, this movie will, in that one little passage, probably confirm for them that they're right all along, that this is Bush's fault. But anybody with half a brain, with any rationality at all cannot help but just be angry at the terrorists - and this movie is going to refocus on the minds of those who see it, the exact reason we are in the war on terror. The footage of the Twin Towers being hit is there. One thing I think should have happened but didn't, the towers do not fall in this movie, and I don't know if they did that because they wanted to keep the chronology accurate, but I thought it would be impactful if the towers fell in this movie.
I'm not going to tell you how they portray the crash of United 93, it could go any number of ways on that and that was one of the things I was most curious about. But the passengers themselves are the focus of this, even though they start with everything in motion, all the four planes that were hijacked. They track that from the moment it happened. They show the terrorists getting up, praying the night before, getting on these airplanes, sitting there nervously waiting to make their moves and so forth. Once you get into the actual United 93 portion of this, these passengers are portrayed as heroes, gutsy. They are inspirational. This is a movie that's going to, I think for those who go to see it, are going to walk out of there with... Well, you're going to walk out in shock, because here's an attempt to accurately portray what goes on and went on on a doomed hijacked airliner where the good guys actually win. This is the only one of the four that did not reach its target, but these people are portrayed as inspirational heroes and gutsy. They learn the other three planes have hit their targets via phone calls that they're making. They make these phone calls in secret without the two terrorist watchdogs knowing that they're doing it, and after awhile they all decide, you know, Todd Beamer said, "Let's roll," and the sequence where they take down the two hijackers watching them and then literally... I almost don't want to describe this to you.
But the way they take over the cockpit and the raw emotion and anger that they are exuding, it's indescribable. You cannot help but think it's real. All of this in the airplane is shot with a hand-held campaigner so it's jerky, it moves around, and the music is powerful. I couldn't tell the melody of course, but it was a great production. Now, I don't know if I saw a prerelease print or if I saw the final version, but there was no cast. They roll the credits, but no cast is identified, and I didn't know if that was on purpose or if they just haven't gotten around to doing it. The movie opens on the 28th. If they don't have cast mentioned in it it's because they don't want to, you know, identify these heroes on this plane and actors playing them, but again, that could just be that this is a prerelease print that we saw yesterday.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let me add a couple more things about the movie. One of the things... we all watched it, we walked out to the lobby in the theater and we were discussing it and one of the things somebody asked me was, "Do you think we've learned anything?"
I said, "You're talking about the way air defenses are portrayed?"
"Yeah, yeah."
I said, "Obviously half the country hasn't learned anything."
"You know, I see what you mean," and I'm not even talking about air defenses. I'm talking about the people of the country. Half - well, not half. I'm assigning a statistical half the of the country to the libs. It's not that large. Whatever the percentage, libs haven't learned anything. They still don't think this is worth it, they still don't think that this enemy is worth - and, I'll tell you what, these generals and everybody out there demanding that Rumsfeld retire or resign or be fired, you tell me who that's going to benefit. What difference is it going to make putting somebody new in with 32 months to go? What difference? This is all a plan designed to take down Bush. This is all a plan to take down this administration. Rumsfeld is just the latest target.
They may have genuine animosity for him. That probably means he's effective. Most of these ex-generals are ex-Clinton-era guys, Zinni and this stuff. We've got details on some of these people. I'll let you hear what they said about Iraq back when they were running the show. It sounds identical to what you hear Rumsfeld say about Iraq building up to this current war that we're having. I think that whatever percentage of the country is made up of kooks, fringe liberals and so forth, they have not learned the lesson of 9/11, and I have no clue if they venture into a theater to watch this, if they will learn anything from it other than stoking their irrational assessment that it's all Bush's fault, and they truly believe that, and they truly believe that Bush is creating more terrorists or Rumsfeld or whoever.
One of the things that amazed me was how gripped I was by this movie. There is not a moment I looked to my watch, "Okay, how long to go on this?" I usually do that during every movie I watch. At some point I look at the watch to see how long I've been watching. I didn't do that once, didn't do it till the movie was over. I had no idea how much time had passed. The way this was put together, it's suspenseful from the moment it opens, and I think that's incredible, given that everybody knows ultimately what's going to happen. You know at every stage of this movie what's going to happen when you're watching the radar of American Flight 11 leave Boston until it leaves the screen when they turn off the transponder in the cockpit.
You know what's going to happen, and yet there's a part of me, there was one little moment where I said, "Gosh, I hope what I know is going to happen doesn't happen." Just one fleeting moment, because now when you're watching. We see it. We know the past. "Can we stop it from happening again?" and that was the question I was asked. "Have we learned anything?" and I think based on the Moussaoui trial, "Yeah, we're trying to fix a lot of things." The Patriot Act. You look at this boondoggle. I mentioned this a little bit yesterday. The Moussaoui trial, his death penalty phase, the government is seeking death on the basis that Moussaoui could have stopped 9/11 but he didn't tell anybody.
That may be, you know, legally, factually true, but I'm still amazed that here's the big, bad US government depending on a conspirator to admit it or we have no chance? The government's running around saying (whining), "Well, well, he didn't tell us! Don't blame us, he didn't tell us. He's gotta die!" Fine, put him to death. He deserves it. But you find out why we couldn't ask him. We couldn't ask him! We couldn't look at his computer because of the wall that Jamie Gorelick and the Clinton administration had built. We couldn't share information. The FBI couldn't share information with the CIA and any of this because of the Clinton era wall on fighting these terrorists in legal proceedings using grand jury testimony. That's secret, and there were a lot of other reasons for the wall as well.
So Bush comes in, has to clean up the mess left by the Clinton people who were inattentive to real problems. We got the Patriot Act. We've got the NSA foreign surveillance program. The Democrats are trying to kill it. They tried to kill the Patriot Act the second time around, applauded when they thought they had. So you ask, "Have we learned anything?" I'm not sure. In fact, I'm damn sure that a significant portion of the country hasn't learned diddly-squat because they're so poisoned with partisan rage that they haven't the guts to face up to the fact that we have an enemy. Their enemy is George W. Bush.
If we try to push Rumsfeld out, if you people join me - not you, but if people join this effort of these ex-generals, which is the latest drive-by media hit to get rid of Rumsfeld, it's only going to benefit the enemy. They're going to be laughing themselves silly in the caves on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and over in Tehran and some of the mosques in Iraq, they're just going to be rubbing their hands in glee - and they're going to be thanking their allies, the ex-generals of the past Clinton administration and the Democratic Party in this country. For some reason there seems to be an ongoing effort to try to sabotage any effort we make to defeat this particular enemy.
This attack on Rumsfeld is an attack on Bush and the war effort. It would be a huge victory for the enemy, and who are they going to confirm in his place? Well, send Cheney over there? That would really go great. Can you imagine confirmation hearings for a new secretary of defense? It would be all about torture and so forth. They're reviving today in certain places on the Internet, they're reviving all of these incidents where Rumsfeld was personally involved in torture. Well, hell's bells! Go see this movie and tell me if you wouldn't want to do something to these creeps that did this to us.
This movie will revive this kind of emotion in you. It's just frustrating as hell, especially having seen the movie, to come out and understand that there's a significant portion of this country and the drive-by media who wants to treat these people that hijacked these airplanes and want to do it again and want to do it with even greater impact and in greater numbers, treat them like just innocent little kids, we shouldn't be tough - it just boggles the mind. So I don't know if we've learned anything as a full nation. No, we haven't. I hold out hope, and I pray that the majority of the country has learned a lesson. You think the Dubai port deal would indicate that they have, and some of the opposition to immigration.
END TRANSCRIPT
|