RUSH: I took a little stroll back to Snerdley’s office during the break. I said, ‘Snerdley, are you bothered by this Putin business? Vladimir Putin is threatening to nuke, aim ICBM nukes at Europe if we deploy our missile shield.’
He said, ‘Nah, not really.’
I said, ‘You know, this nation owes me a debt.’
I, ladies and gentlemen, was the single, lonely voice — the only voice in major media including the Drive-Bys — who when Putin came to office, and he came over here and went to the barbecue down there in Texas and was riding around in the Jeep with President Bush, and was even uttering some English words now and then, I sounded a warning to the nation and the world. I said, ‘Folks, this guy is KGB. He is a former KGB ranking commander. He is a KGB communist, and those people do not change.’
I warned the world. I said, ‘This guy getting his hands on the controls of the new Russia means that a return to the old Soviet Union is something that you have to factor,’ and, lo and behold!
He’s not the first Soviet leader to threaten Europe with nukes. Brezhnev was constantly threatening Western Europe with nuclear strikes in his threats. He was, of course, threatening his own bloc with much the same thing. Then I remember Dung Xiaoping. Dung Xiaoping was the diminutive, small, chain smoking head honcho of the ChiComs.
‘Have you noticed that in this country, we just seem obsessed with everybody liking us?’
Snerdley said, ‘Yeah, we just want everybody to like us.’
I said, (New Castrati voice) ‘Yeah, and that’s because, Mr. Snerdley, we must reduce tensions, and the tensions exist because of us. We’re the superpower, and we have to reduce these tensions! We have to show these people we mean them no harm.’
Of course, when we do that, they just chuckle and laugh.
People are who they are. No amount of trying to make them like us is going to accomplish anything other than making them think we’re a bunch of patsies. We liked Dung Xiaoping so much we let him smoke at the Kennedy Center when he went in there to watch some command performance or something in his honor. Now, this Putin thing, this is not insignificant. You know, there have been reports — I don’t know if these are true — that Russian military equipment was seen in Iraq spiriting away something to Syria. Our source for this is one of Saddam’s ex-generals. He said that the Russians were there spiriting the weapons of mass destruction out in trucks and so forth, across the border into Syria. People have said, ‘Why wouldn’t the Bush administration make reference to this instead of sitting there day in and day out taking it on the chin about there having been no weapons of mass destruction?’ The answer to that question, ‘Well, we have a budding new relationship with Putin and the Russians, and we don’t want to accuse them of anything on the world stage. We don’t want to aggravate them or make them mad.’
It’s the same old same old.
Now with Putin over there starting to huff and puff about our missile shield, I just wonder if this would give Bush an opening. Ah, it’s never going to happen. It’s idle speculation here. When I voice it, I realize how ridiculous that it sounds. But I alone, ladies and gentlemen, was the one sounding warnings about this guy because he’s KGB. Now, there may not be a KGB anymore but there are KGB people, and he’s one of them. There’s a replacement of the KGB, the FSB [Federal Security Service]. Putin is the authoritarian. This guy is wiping people out left and right. He’s wiping out spies that turn on him, who write books on him. There’s something to be concerned about here. Something else, too, that I want to make mention. Over the many, many years of this busy broadcast, I have been sitting here, minding my own business, and inviting those of you who listen to call about pretty much whatever you want to call about. Over these many years of broadcast service, many of you have called and accused me of being a lapdog to the Bush administration, a lackey. What are some of the terms, Mr. Snerdley, that they have called me? Yeah, ‘kowtowing’ to the Bush administration, carrying the water, and so forth. I have noticed that there haven’t been any calls in the past year, six months, nine months, year, whatever, from those of you leveling that charge at me to apologize for having gotten that wrong. It’s not that I am looking for that. I don’t allow my self-image to be determined by what people think of me. If I did, I’d have been in an insane asylum long ago in a straitjacket with no hope for ever getting out. It’s not that. It’s just easy for people to throw these charges around and so forth, but when evidence exists that you have been wrong…
I correct my mistakes, rare as they are, as soon as I possibly can when I find out that I have made one. These are just a few little observations here.
