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CALLER: Well, let's get it on, buddy.

RUSH: -- because you are so dead wrong about this. You Democrats, all it takes, give you one little shred of rope, and you've got a noose around your neck inside of 30 seconds! This is not trading with the enemies. Your union was not "attacked." Your union is not going to be put out of business. Where did you go to the idea that Bush wants the deal to go through to put the longshoreman out of business is beyond me. That's paranoia. That's stereotypical. You are profiling. You are profiling Republicans -- and you're doing all with that absolutely zero knowledge. Trading with the Enemy Act! Three felonies!

You wish. (sigh)

If these are felonies, give me one.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

If you missed the previous -- well, the last call in the previous hour, a man identifying himself as a proud member of the longshoremen union in Long Beach, a man named Jerry, called and said, don't you threaten my union, or don't you criticize my union. Well, what he was referring to is that I continue to dig deep on the port deal, and I have learned that much of the opposition to the port deal -- from the likes of Senator Schumer and Senator Clinton, Senator Lautenberg, Senator Menendez, Senator Boxer and others -- may not be what it seems. They're hiding, I think, under the cloak of being concerned about national security, but when you look at it what really is happening here is that they are all huge recipients of large contributions from the longshoremen's union, which, I mean, that's not a surprise to anybody. Organized labor supports the Democratic Party en rote. They just don't even think about it. It's a reflex action -- and it's a little hypocrite because we already have all kinds of business deals and arrangements with the United Arab Emirates and the Clinton administration way back when sold them 60 F-16s.

We've allowed them to own property in this country and so forth. But when the longshoremen union member threatened me, it jogged my fertile memory, ladies and gentlemen. I recalled in recent years -- I thought it was two or three years ago, turns out it was, well, a little over three, 2002 -- there was a strike by the Long Beach longshoreman over the modernization of procedures cataloging and inventorying cargo that was on ships and was off-loaded. You'll remember this. It was the bar code scanning controversy. They wanted to put bar code scanning on all of the incoming cargo to help find out where it is, rather than send off a bunch of human beings to try to find it.

"Let's find out exactly where it is; let's computerize it," and the longshoremen fought this. This is nothing new. Unions have been fighting advanced technology since there has been advanced technology. I mean, they're afraid it will affect their jobs -- and they went on strike right around Christmastime in this year in order to make their case, and they had ships that couldn't get into port because the ships that were in port wouldn't be off-loaded, and those ships couldn't be reloaded and sent back out. You had a fleet of cargo ships out in the Pacific waiting to get in, and it got so bad that people were demanding that President Bush get involved. This was Christmas, after all.

The longshoremen -- let me read to you, this is from a little website here, Slate.com -- and it's titled, "Short Port Report," and I'll just read you an excerpt: "...and organized workers have resisted new technology since the 1800s," and that's exactly what the longshoremen are doing now. "The port operators want to start using bar code scanners to speed cargo through terminals. More likely than not those operators will want to engage outside contractors to run the new scanners, and those contractors will employ nonunion labor. It's easy to sympathize with workers whose jobs are displaced technology. EZ Pass has meant the elimination of many decent paying jobs for toll booth clerks," and, of course, we used to have a buggy whip industry and a buggy industry. But with the car, out went the buggy and the buggy whip industry. "Union members in question here get paid more like accountants than day laborers. According to Pacific Maritime Association, the average annual salaries at the ports for longshore workers is $82,895 a year for class A workers, $118,444 for clerks, and $157,352 a year for foremen."