RUSH: To Cookeville, Tennessee, we go. This is Kathy. Kathy, great to have you with us. By the way, Kathy is one of my all-time top ten favorite female names.
CALLER: Oh, I am so impressed to hear that.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I’m so impressed to talk to you, I’m practically speechless — which if you knew me well, it has not happened very often.
RUSH: I can imagine, because you’re a woman.
CALLER: Oh…. Well! (giggles) Maybe so. I was thinking last night particularly that, after doing some reading recently and biography of Winston Churchill.
RUSH: Yes?
CALLER: You really remind me a lot of him and his convictions and his ideology, particularly in that war must be fought sometimes and that you must achieve a victory and defeat your enemies in order to achieve peace — and I just wondered, hypothetically, if things had been different, and Winston had been in your seat, and you were a caller, would you be a dittohead of his?
RUSH: Oh, yeah. I’m a great admirer of Winston Churchill’s. I think he was one of the most prescient, brilliant men. My family admired him. When I was growing up, that’s when I first heard Winston Churchill. My father and grandfather adored Winston Churchill. They idolized him, and we’d sit around on Sunday, go out to my grandfather’s house, and my grandfather and my dad would all share Winston Churchill anecdotes and stories, things that they knew and things they’d read about him. So I had an early exposure to Churchill. In fact, the first time I went to England, I went to Blenheim Palace where he was born, which is where the Duke of Marlboro now lives, who is also a member of a club where I’m a member here. So I’ve got a little bit of a connection. It’s a fascinating trip to go see where Winston Churchill was born and grew up, and I’ve read something about him, but, look, I’m blown away by your comparison of me to Winston Churchill. I thank you very much for that, but that’s a stretch.
CALLER: Well, you’re welcome. I know you didn’t have the same backgrounds or the same vocations, but there are a lot of similarities in your conservatism than he ultimately found, and particularly on his belief that you must achieve victory and you must suppress the enemies of the world, and I just want to compliment you again for doing what you do —
RUSH: Well, thank you.
CALLER: — and for getting the word out.
RUSH: I’ll tell you something about Churchill, since you want to talk about him as a commander-in-chief of sorts during wartime. Hitler was amassing power but did not have great military strength in 1936, and that’s when Churchill first started sounding huge warnings, and they wouldn’t listen to him. Nobody in Great Britain wanted to listen to him, nobody wanted to listen to him anywhere. They’d just came out of World War I, they didn’t want this bang the drums of war and stop this. And he ran around, he was doing everything he could to alert people. He said, trying to get everybody’s attention, if we deal with this now, the price is going to be very small. It’s going to be much easier to deal with Hitler right now than if we wait. But of course Churchill had to sit by and watch Neville Chamberlain travel to meet Hitler. Chamberlain came back, and he was the most popular person in Great Britain at the time. He was waving this agreement that Hitler had signed. ‘We have peace in our time! I have brought you peace in our time.’ Of course, a year after that, bam! Hitler started his march.
The interesting thing is that in 1936, if Winston Churchill had been listened to, the French — believe it or not — had far more military power and strength in machines, guns, ammo, soldiers than Germany. Hitler was just like consolidating. He’s got his power but he hadn’t put his military together. The French could have wiped Hitler out the moment he made his move on the Rhineland, and they didn’t. Thomas Sowell writes about this today. In fact,he talks about the moral paralysis, the inability to deal with what faces you. You put it off, and you’re only going to have to deal with it later, be it Hitler or be it Al-Qaeda or be it any enemy that you have. You can’t wish bad people away. Sally Quinn yesterday was on hard-boiled with Chris Matthews. The Drive-Bys are fascinated, folks, with this spat that’s going on between Hillary and Obama. Hillary is calling it silly, the name-calling what’s going on about whether or not we should go meet with these thug dictators. Obama in a debate said that he would. Hillary said it’s ‘naïve.’ So the Obama camp is firing back and calling Hillary names, and the Drive-Bys love this. The headlines about this today are everywhere. E. J. Dionne, Jr. in the Washington Post today: ‘This could be the tipping point in the campaign! This could be the deciding…’
They’re just so happy for anything to happen, and they’re so excited that the gloves have come off. They’re amplifying the importance of this. So they brought in Sally Quinn, who is the social secretary of Washington, DC, former CBS News babe and Washington Post writer, married to Benjamin Bradlee of Watergate fame during the Washington Post days. She said (paraphrasing), ‘Well, you know, Chris, um, Obama may have a point. These thugs, these dictators just want respect. You know, they’re backroom bullies and so forth, and if you just talk to them, if we just go talk to them, then it makes them feel like they’re respected, and you can talk them down from things.’ You sit here and you read this, and the mind explodes over the naïveté because the lessons of history are: you don’t talk to them and you certainly don’t give them respect. They are murderous thug dictators. They’re tyrants! Their people live in oppression. So back to the Churchill example. Churchill said we can deal with this with so little cost and so little pain. Nobody wanted to listen to him, and look what happened! They had to deal with it. The whole world had to deal with it later on, just four years after 1936.
We face the same situation here, but people want to put their head in the sands and pretend that the problem is not as bad as it is because way over there. The parallels between Iran, by the way, and Mahmoud Ahmadinajad, are many. ‘He’s just a guy that wants self-respect. Let’s just go talk to him. He’s just crying out for help. He’s the Lindsay Lohan of the Middle East. He just wants a little attention. He wants some help.’ You look at the way that country is run and you tell me if you want your wife or daughter to live there — if you want to live there! By the way, the Iraqis, you know, one of the things that is uniting the Iraqis against equate that these Islamofascists are coming in with — I love how the media calls it all kinds of new ‘conservative’ behavioral rules. One of the things that the militant Islam fascists of Al-Qaeda have stopped, is smoking, and Iraqis love to smoke cigarettes, and the Iraqis are having their index, middle finger of their right hands cut off if they are seen by Al-Qaeda smoking cigarettes, and this is making them mad. We’ve got stories of troops marching into areas and rescuing some people that have been pinned down for a while, citizens, and the first thing they ask for is cigarettes, not food and water.
This is turning average Iraqis against Al-Qaeda. Can you imagine the goodwill if we’d just drop a bunch of Camels — the cigarettes, a bunch of Camels; it’s a perfect brand — right into Baghdad and some of these areas? We could own the place. The cigarette airlift across Iraq. It makes all the sense in the world. Little things like this. At any rate, we’re going to have to deal with this one way or the other. Whatever the Democrats do, pull us out, keep us there, we have no choice but to defeat these people. That’s the clarion call that Winston Churchill kept trying to get the British people to understand. But the liberals of his day just like the liberals of our day, liberals are liberals, didn’t want to deal with it; didn’t think it mattered. Hitler could run roughshod all over Europe but he wasn’t going to touch us because he signed that thing with Chamberlain — and of course Neville Chamberlain actually went and talked to Hitler, right? He had to talk to him to get the signature, had to get ‘peace in our time.’ He followed the Sally Quinn rule. And the next thing the Brits new, they’re being bombarded with rockets and threats of attack all over the place. You gotta deal with your enemy by defeating them if you want to maintain your own freedom.