RUSH: Let’s listen to some of this debate stuff, ladies and gentlemen. We have the questions, we have the YouTube questions. I don’t know how many of you people watched this, but I did last night. I was working, and I was working for you last night. I watched this, and I’m telling you it was torture because I knew, the moment I heard the question, I knew what the answers were going to be. There are conflicting analyses today on who scored the best. Some people say that Hillary just cleaned up. Others are saying that Obama really, really did better among Democrats than Hillary did because he came across more genuine and more trustworthy. Others are saying Obama blew it on an important national security question, which we have here. Here’s the question from Stephen in California.
STEPHEN: In 1982, Anwar Sadat traveled to Israel, a trip that resulted in a peace agreement that has lasted ever since. In the spirit of that type of bold leadership, would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?
RUSH: And here’s what Barry Obama said.
OBAMA: I would. And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them — which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration — is ridiculous. (APPLAUSE) Now, Ronald Reagan and Democratic presidents like JFK constantly spoke to Soviet Union at a time when Ronald Reagan called them an evil empire. And the reason is because they understood that we may not trust them and they may pose an extraordinary danger to this country, but we had the obligation to find areas where we can potentially move forward. And I think that it is a disgrace that we have not spoken to them. We’ve been talking about Iraq — one of the first things that I would do in terms of moving a diplomatic effort in the region forward is to send a signal that we need to talk to Iran and Syria because they’re going to have responsibilities if Iraq collapses.
RUSH: Whoa!
OBAMA: They have been acting irresponsibly up until this point.
RUSH: No, tell me I didn’t just hear that.
OBAMA: But if we tell them that we are not going to be a permanent occupying force, we are in a position to say that they are going to have to carry some weight, in terms of stabilizing the region.
RUSH: Oh, my goodness, folks, I cannot believe this. I stood up in my chair last night when I heard this. If Iraq collapses, Iran and Syria are going to have responsibilities? How is Iraq going to collapse? Only if we pull out. So if people like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton get their way, we pull out of there, then Iraq collapses, then we turn it over to Iran and Syria, and they’re going to have responsibility, and we got a tell them about it? Do you understand, this is caving in, this is giving away an opportunity here to establish a little beachhead of freedom in that part of the world so desperately needed, he wants to turn it over to a couple of thuggish terrorist sponsoring regimes after he talks to them and tells them what their responsibilities are. Stabilize the region? Anyway, Mrs. Clinton decided that she had a different opinion about this approach.
CLINTON: I will not promise to meet with the leaders of these countries during my first year. I will promise a very vigorous diplomatic effort because I think it is not that you promise a meeting at that high a level before you know what the intentions are. I don’t want to be used for propaganda purposes. I don’t want to make a situation even worse. But I certainly agree that we need to get back to diplomacy, which has been turned into a bad word by this administration, and I will pursue very vigorous diplomacy, and I will use a lot of high level presidential envoys to test the waters, to feel the way. But certainly we’re not going to just have our president meet with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and, you know, the president of North Korea, Iran, and Syria until we know better what the way forward would be.
RUSH: All right, now the serious policy wonks would tell you here that Hillary’s answer is far more substantive and weighty and far more presidential. But there’s a problem with her answer, and it is from last April. AP, from a city in Iowa. Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday criticized President Bush’s foreign policy, said if she were president, she would do things differently, including beginning diplomatic talks with supposed enemies and sending envoys throughout the world. ‘I would begin diplomatic discussions with those countries with whom we have differences to try to figure out what is the depth of those differences.’ So in April she said she would do what Obama said he would do. Well, she didn’t quite say she would meet with them personally, but you can see that she’s got her static answer to this. And a lot of people think, well, she did appear more presidential. She did appear to have a little bit more weight there and substance in her answer. Rachel, you’re nodding your head in agreement. Do you think Hillary’s answer is better than Barack Obama’s? It’s irrelevant, because none of this is going to happen, is the bottom line.
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RUSH: I’m sitting here, and I am still stunned and amazed at Barack Obama’s answer here on whether or not he would start talking to the bad guys and our enemies. This business that he’d talk to Iran and Syria and tell them they have responsibilities if Iraq collapses? Barack, I got one word for you: Lebanon! Syria sure doesn’t want to get stuck with chaos in Lebanon?! They’re causing it! They’re creating it! They’re creating the chaos in Iraq, and you think they’re going to sit down and talk to Bashar Assad and get him to act responsibly? (Laughing.) Furthermore, ladies and gentlemen, LA Times: ‘Barack obama [sic] says preventing genocide isn’t a good enough reason to stay in Iraq. ‘By that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven’t done,’ he told the Associated Press. ‘We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done. Those of us who care about Darfur don’t think it would be a good idea.’ It’s worth at least pointing out a key difference between the potential genocide in Iraq and the heart-wrenching slaughters in Congo and Sudan…’
I’m reading here from an un-bylined LA Times piece. ‘The latter aren’t our fault [Congo and Sudan]. But if genocide unfolds in Iraq after American troops depart, it would be hard to argue that we weren’t at least partly to blame.’ Amen! Exactly right. That’s what makes Barack’s answer here, in a serious substantive way, so inane, and it’s not worth staying? We would be causing that genocide just as we caused the genocide in Cambodia and other parts of Vietnam when we pulled out of there. (Pardon me for telling the truth about that, Senator Kerry.) Now, the whole Darfur question came up last night, using diplomacy, in response to a question from three aid workers standing in front of a refugee camp in Sudan’s Darfur region. It provoked a response from Biden. Biden said, ‘I’m so tired of this, ‘The United States must send troops now.’ Those kids will be dead by the time the diplomacy is over,’ 2,500 American troops. If we don’t get the 21,000 UN troops in there we can stop the genocide now. When pressed on the same question, Mrs. Clinton says she doesn’t support putting American troops in Darfur because we gotta finish out what we’re doing in Iraq, where our troops are stretched thin and Afghanistan where we’re losing the fight to Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.’
Well, we’re not. (laughs) So Hillary is throwing Darfur under the bus, and do you know why she threw Darfur under the bus? The kook base was watching this debate last night! That’s why she through Darfur under the bus. Don’t send troops anywhere. The kook base doesn’t want US troops anywhere, folks, not even for Meals on Wheels missions because they don’t trust the military to sit around and just distribute food. They think they’ll start firing guns, and once that happens, the kook fringe runs for the tall grass. But I have to disagree with the serious analysts who say that Barack’s answer, in the context of the debate last night and the Looney Toons that had to be watching it — and I count myself last night as a Looney Toon watching this, but it’s part of the job. That’s the thing that you have to understand, that Barack’s answer — and remember the context of the question. ‘Sadat traveled to Israel. The trip resulted in peace agreement. In the spirit of that type of bold leadership, would you be willing to separately meet with all those rogue bad guys?’ So the tone of the question is: ‘Can’t we all just get along? There’s so much strife in the world, and there’s so much horror. There’s so much angst, and so much partisanship, and there’s so much disagreement? Can’t we just get together? Can’t we just get together? Will you talk with these people and bring us peace?’ Well, Barack knows who’s watching this debate last night: the anti-war, kook fringe base of the Democrat Party, and of course all these 2900 YouTube submitters hoping and praying that their video got used. So he knows what the audience is. Hillary with this nuanced answer, I don’t know how well it played with the kook fringe audience watching this last night.
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RUSH: John in Tallahassee, Florida. We start with you as we get to the phones. Nice to have you with us, sir.
CALLER: Thanks. Hey, Rush.
RUSH: Hey.
CALLER: You know, I didn’t listen to that debate last night. I had better things to do.
RUSH: So did I, so did I, but I had no excuse. It’s my job to watch that stuff.
CALLER: Yeah, thank you for that.
RUSH: You should be thanking me that I did.
CALLER: I’m going to do that now.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: But as you played the clip from the fine senator Obama, my head about exploded as well, because they continue to get away with just recreating or trying to recreate and reinvent history as they’ve done with every other thing. But it was particularly offensive was Obama trying to evoke Ronald Reagan in his answer to the question about whether or not he would have one-on-one talks with the heathens that oppose us in other parts of the world. And he had the nerve to utilize an example of Reagan meeting with Gorbachev as a precedence for doing such. You know, what he forgets is the fact that Reagan met with Gorbachev in the fall of ’85, you know, his third year in office, he called the Soviet Union the ‘evil empire’ in ’83 when there was a different foreign minister or secretary or whatever they call that person in the old USSR which was Yuri Andropov — and, frankly, the only reason he even met with Gorbachev in Reykjavik was because he was more or less forced by folks like Margaret Thatcher. He was against the meetings, but what he saw was exactly what our friends in the Democratic Party want us to do, which was he saw an appeaser. He saw Gorbachev as a liberal, as things go in the USSR. Gorbachev was an elitist, intellectual.
RUSH: In fact, one of the reasons… You know, everybody was urging throughout Reagan’s first term, ‘Why don’t you meet with the Soviets? You better meet with the Soviets!’ He said, ‘Uh, their leaders keep dying on me. Why should I go talk to these guys that are going to be dead in six months and just have to do it all over again? I’ve got nothing to say to them.’ He said they’re going to implode of their own immorality. We just have to sit by and keep the pressure up. There’s no reason that they don’t have to look at them as a constant presence because, call them the evil empire. They don’t have to always exist. But the liberals thought oh, they do have to always exist, must appease these people, balance of power, all this sort of stuff. Finally did meet with Gorbachev, and walked out of the meeting. You know, he offered to disarm. He said, I’ll tell you what, Mike. I’ll get rid of all my nukes, you get rid of all of yours. Gorbachev said nyet. Reagan said we’ve got nothing to talking about, then, out the door, came back home. And it was after that Gorbachev followed him back, and Gorbachev arrived in Washington in 1987, and that’s when the Gorbasm was born.
Because when Gorbachev landed on that Aleutian 62 jetliner (the technology to build it stolen from Boeing, no doubt), all these liberals and the Drive-By Media and everybody is out at the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base. That plane lands, and they’re coming in there. I watched it on television. You can just see it’s like these people are getting ready to have a collective giant orgasm when that plane door opened and Gorbachev with that birthmark — which kept growing during the eighties, typifying Soviet expansionism. You could even see the East Coast of the United States in that birthmark: Florida, little bit of Maine, some of the Gulf coast. He got off that airplane, and there was a (gasp!). ‘He’s here! Oh, my God, the world’s safe! Reagan isn’t going to blow us up. Reagan is not going to blow us up! He saved us.’ Gorbachev got here, and they had their big summit and so forth, and wasn’t long after that the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Glasnost, perestroika, and all of that, and what Reagan never backed down from was the Strategic Defense Initiative.
You’re right. Obama is trying to tell these lamebrains that made up this audience last night that we got rid of the Soviet Union by telling them to go away, and that they said, ‘Okay!’ (Laughing.) ‘You guys are bad. You should not exist. You should disband,’ and Obama wants this audience that watched last night to think that it was diplomacy. It wasn’t diplomacy. It was the threat! The Soviet Union understood we could do it. It was the threat to build SDI, Strategic Defense Initiative. They knew they couldn’t keep up. They knew it would render their nuclear arsenal worthless, they knew we could do it because we are the United States of America. So it was over, and it didn’t come about by virtue of diplomacy. So, you’re right, Obama — and I had this thought as I was listening to it. It’s just other things that he said blew my mind even more.