RUSH: Stewart in Berthoud, Colorado. Nice to have you on Open Line Friday.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, how you doing?
RUSH: I’m great. Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Hey. Well, thank you — and I can only assume that you intentionally didn’t remember something Wednesday when you were asked the question about diplomatic successes over the last 50 years.
RUSH: Well, if I forgot it then, I’m still forgetting it. What is it?
CALLER: Well, the two that you did mention — Reagan walking out of Reykjavik, and Bill Clinton and his diplomacy with his wife.
RUSH: Yeah, that’s the big, big example there, yeah.
CALLER: Well, you forgot the most important and probably greatest diplomatic success of our time just several years ago.
RUSH: And that is…?
CALLER: And that would be G. W. and his hard talk after 9/11 as well as his diplomatic effort through war in Afghanistan and Iraq, that saw Moammar Khadafy and Libya give up tons and tons of WMD.
RUSH: Yeah, but there was no diplomacy about that. You even undercut your argument with your own words. It was: We invaded Iraq in the early nineties, took care of them inside of what? Two days.
CALLER: Yeah, well, it was a big stick —
RUSH: That’s not diplomacy. Big stick diplomacy is when you wave it around and threaten to use it and somebody responds to it. This time we used the stick and we used the stick again in 2003 going back into Iraq.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: We went into Afghanistan. It was pure fear. It wasn’t diplomacy. It was the fear of God (or fear of Allah) that was put into the mind of Khadafy. Don’t forget, he’s already sitting there quaking in his boots because Reagan bombed his tent, after Khadafy was widely held responsible when Pan Am flight 103 went down over Lockerbie, Scotland. Reagan sent a couple of F-18 Hornets and such over there. We had to fly around the Iberian Peninsula because the French and the Spanish wouldn’t give us permission to fly over, so we had to go around, up the tunnel, into the Mediterranean, handsome pilots targeting the tent, and Khadafy’s daughter happened to be in there. So that’s when it started. That is not diplomacy.