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Leaked White House Transcript (8)

“We Kicked their Butts in Vietnam”

by Lee Waters

Dissident Voice

August 4, 2003

Bush, Cheney, Rove, Ridge, Ashcroft

PRESIDENT BUSH: Get your asses in here, gentlemen. I've had about enough, goddammit.

KARL ROVE: Calm down, George. You handled things well enough. I see no real problems here.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Karl, how many times do I have to tell you these goddam press conferences are a waste of my time. I could've been lifting weights or jogging, for chrissakes. Who the hell are these little wimps to be asking me questions. There's only One that asks me questions and One I answer to. Now, you've had me stand up in front of these media creeps nine times now. Why don't we just have them all shot.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: I assure you, George, over the coming months many of them WILL be shot, or at least otherwise disposed of. But we need these press conferences to smoke them out, to see who's going to be troublesome and who seems to be a threat.

PRESIDENT BUSH: How about that asshole Bill Plante, the one that yelled out about having the damn conference in the first place. Why don't you send him to visit Paul Wellstone, the sonofabitch.

KARL ROVE: Well, he's pretty high on the list, sir. But there's plenty of time and plenty of resources to deal with all these little annoyances.

PRESIDENT BUSH: And Rush Limbaugh, why wasn't he here today? Talk about a free press. He's the only one that counts, anyway. He's the only other one that speaks to and for God, like I do.

KARL ROVE: Rush we own, of course, lock stock and barrel. So it looks fishy to bother dragging him out for these things. Besides, we just got him set up at ESPN to call the football games. We can't do any better than that.

SECRETARY RIDGE: Well, but sir, over the years Mr. Limbaugh has become rather famous for his racist remarks and his obvious disdain for African-Americans. Yet a majority of the players in the National Football League are….

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Yeah, yeah, Tom. We know. And Rush knows. So we've had him do some obligatory groveling. And during the games he's going to cool it and pretend he actually likes these people. I've given him some one-liners, you know, the old Cheney humor, ha ha ha, that should lighten up his act.

SECRETARY RIDGE: Well, but sir, he also made some very positive statements about the Ku Klux Klan. He said it was a harmless social club when we all know they're still out lynching. In fact, they're on the list of groups we're supposed to monitor as part of Homeland Security. Rush says he loves them.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Tom, they can be on your list from now til 2008. But remember we use our friends at the KKK to win elections. In this day and age, we rely primarily on computers to block black people off the ballot, like we did in Florida. But push come to shove, it never hurts to be able to burn a cross or two.

KARL ROVE: Right. And you listen closely to what Rush says on the air. He'll be all nice and rosy as the games go on. But there'll be subtleties there. He'll deny them, of course. But you watch how many of the players he lauds are white and how many are black and the little things he'll slip while he plugs George W. here. Divide and conquer, Tom, and don't you ever forget it.

ATTORNEY-GENERAL ASHCROFT: Preaching racial harmony is an act of terrorism.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Why don't we put that wonderful Dennis Miller on the football games. Add a little humor while he sucks my toes.

SECRETARY RIDGE: Uh, well sir, they tried that already.

KARL ROVE: Right. That's where we got the idea for Rush, actually. Dennis was on Monday night football. It was embarrassing.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Grotesque is more like it. I, of course, love humor as much as the next man, ha ha ha. But Miller was miserable. I had the mute button set so it would come on automatically whenever he began to talk.

PRESIDENT BUSH: But he's very very funny. He reminds of that guy, what was his name?….Bela Lagosi.

KARL ROVE: Let's put it this way, George. Dennis was very very broke. He failed at Saturday Night Live and Monday night football and there just weren't many days of the week left for a loser like that. The only guy laughing at his jokes was him. So we offered him a bundle---not a BIG bundle mind you---and of course he grabbed it.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Little Denny is doing for you what Monica Lewinsky did for Bill Clinton.

PRESIDENT BUSH: You mean he's gay? Dennis Miller is gay?

KARL ROVE: Let's just say he's happy. Happy to be getting a paycheck. He's a rightwinger with us for the same reason Willy Sutton robbed banks---because that's where the money is.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Yeah, just like Al From and those wimps over at the Democratic Leadership Council. Now they're earning their paychecks again. Divide the party, boys. Cut their balls off. We don't need any focused, angry Democrats to deal with in 2004. Give us the usual set of wimps and we'll wipe the floor with them. That's what we pay you for.

ATTORNEY-GENERAL ASHCROFT: Focused Democrats are known terrorists.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Speaking of which, can you believe those idiots just passed our energy bill. Just when I start thinking there might be some brains over there, the Democrats prove me wrong again. And believe me, it's the only time this century that's happened.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yeah, well what's with all this shit I'm catching about Saddam's nukes. You told me we could lie about it and never hear another word. Well, we've heard plenty of words, and I'm not happy.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: It's that Jew bastard Seymour Hirsh, George. He broke then damn story, again, just like My Lai. Why can't we get him killed already?

ATTORNEY-GENERAL ASHCROFT: Seymour Hirsh is a known terrorist.

KARL ROVE: We called him that, already. It didn't stick. Fact is, there are still some trouble-makers out there in the media. And you've just got to play the odds. We lied about Saddam's ties to Osama. We lied about the weapons of mass destruction. We lied about the nukes. We're now even lying about how Saddam wouldn't let in UN weapons inspectors. Nobody remembers anything in this country. We could blame Saddam for Pearl Harbor and nobody would call us on it. So sooner or later a Sy Hirsh is going to yell and one of these things will cause us trouble. But not to worry.

PRESIDENT BUSH: I thought the Koreans attacked Pearl Harbor.

KARL ROVE: Actually, they did, George. That's why we've got to get back at them and take away their nukes.

SECRETARY RIDGE: Well, sir, you know sometimes these untruths can come back on us. Look at what happened to Richard Nixon. Don't you think it might just be better sometimes to tell the truth?

PRESIDENT BUSH, VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY, KARL ROVE: Loud, prolonged laughter.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Dick was too damn soft. He let guys like Magruder and Dean live. We won't make the same mistake.

KARL ROVE: Remember, Tom, we've triangulated ultimate responsibility for the Iraq attack to a bunch of Jews. None of whom are in this room, of course. But we've got Wolfowitz and Perle and Abrams and Podhoretz and the rest of those idiot neo-cons nicely set up. If things really go bad over there, we can just throw them to the wolves. George will ultimately accept responsibility, of course. But not before we've fingered the real culprits, those eternal Jews.

PRESIDENT BUSH: None of them can go to Heaven until they accept Jesus, anyway. They won't be part of the 12,000. That's what the Bible says.

ATTORNEY-GENERAL ASHCROFT: Uppity Jews are known terrorists.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: I like what Pat Robertson said about the Supreme Court, by the way. Can you believe that phony bitch Sandy O'Connor standing up for gay marriage. I've got nothing against lesbians, mind you. But I'll be damned if my daughter is going to marry one.

KARL ROVE: Pat's got to be more careful about what he says. He's got plenty of people that can kill off the Justices we want dead, one by one. But there's no reason to go public. Just do it already.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: I still think we should've knocked off Jeb Magruder before he finally spilled the beans on Nixon.

PRESIDENT BUSH: How about Jeb Bush? Think of what HE knows!!!

KARL ROVE: We may need him again in 2004, George. Don't forget, we've got to knock another thirty or 40,000 black voters off Florida's registration rolls before the election. Your polls just aren't that strong.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, what pisses me off is that here we killed Saddam's sons and that still isn't enough. We'll get Saddam too. Then what? What the hell do these people want?

KARL ROVE: George, killing those two got us a week of free media. It blacked out the Americans that got killed there in the meantime. It kept the focus off the economy. We got our money's worth.

SECRETARY RIDGE: It still seems to me the economy is people's main concern. What good will killing Saddam do for the economy?

KARL ROVE: Well, it's time George started reminding people how bad the economy was during the 1990s. Unemployment was rampant when Bill Clinton was in the White House. There was corruption. There was poverty. There was hopelessness. Enron. WorldCom. 9/11. All Clinton's fault. Not until George was elected did the unemployment rate start to drop and people begin to find work again.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Right. I remember that. And Hillary is responsible for gay marriages and all those priests molesting those little boys.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: And the Lewinsky thing caused Kobe Bryant to go mad. Don't forget that.

ATTORNEY-GENERAL ASHCROFT: Gay sex is an act of terrorism.

KARL ROVE: We've got to space these things out. Remember that if we have a quarter-million troops in Iraq that's a quarter-million Americans that aren't out of work. If the Iraqis kill five or ten a week, so what? We've got the oil coming in, we've got the military spending to boost the economy, we've got a bunch of Guardsmen and reservists off the unemployment rolls. And we can keep our media amused so they don't cover those body bags coming home. What could be better?

SECRETARY RIDGE: The Iraqis are saying killing the Husseins won't make any difference. They say it's a mukawama shaabia, a popular guerilla war, based at the grassroots. They say Islamic fighters are coming from all over just to kill an American in Iraq, like it's some kind of shooting gallery.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Bring it on, goddammit. We kicked their butts in Vietnam, we'll kick their butts in Iraq.

SECRETARY RIDGE: Well, actually sir, we lost….

KARL ROVE: The plan is simple, gentlemen. Just keep the news bites coming. They kill ten of our troops, we feed the media some hokum on gay marriage. They blow up our barracks, we give them some homegrown terrorism. We just keep the hits coming til 2004. And then we clean house.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Yeah, Sy Hirsh, kiss your butt goodbye.

KARL ROVE: And above all, we remind everyone how the bad economy is Bill Clinton's fault.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: We keep the troop levels up. We keep spending the military money. We flood the place with that cheap Iraqi oil.

KARL ROVE: Right. We even got away with saying Saddam wouldn't let in the UN weapons inspectors when we all know exactly the opposite was true. So we can now get away with telling the world about how bad things were under Bill and Hill. Who's going to call us on it? Dennis Miller?

ATTORNEY-GENERAL ASHCROFT: Blaming the bad economy on President Bush is an act of terrorism.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Yeah, and we up the disappearances rate. We nailed that kid who wrote that nasty FORTUNATE SON, about George here. Amazing how the media will buy a suicide story.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Why don't we set up some of those camps like I saw last month in Germany? My granddaddy Prescott helped finance those operations, you know. Very efficient. Great labor policies. And they helped us get rid of a lot of you-know-who's.

KARL ROVE: Think Guantanamo, George. It's Spanish for Auschwitz.

The Free Press: The first of these transcripts came unannounced to the e-mail address of The Free Press (www.freepress.org) in November of 2002. Since that first posting, the author has written us using the name "Lee Waters." We make no definitive statement as to these articles' true origin. To read the first seven transcripts visit: http://www.freepress.org/columns.php?strFunc=display&strAuthor=10.