RUSH: Okay. Folks, let me get (for me on a Friday) a little serious here for a moment. I’ve had conversations in recent days, weeks, with liberals. Every time I mention this to you, I get, ‘Why are you hanging around them?’ Well, you can’t avoid ’em, and I’m not afraid of them. I like engaging them sometimes, because these people, many of them are just following a script. They’ve got their template, their narrative, and life is very compartmentalized and if something doesn’t fit the little cocoon that they’ve woven for themselves to live in, if you can penetrate that cocoon, you can blow ’em up, you can cause them all kinds of problems. The mind starts working.
I was talking to a couple people this week, and they couldn’t get off of Iraq. ‘Iraq, it’s a horrible country. We’ve lost our reputation in the world. We’re losing in Iraq, and there was no reason to go there. Saddam wasn’t a threat to us,’ blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m listening to it, and all of the attempts that I made to try to explain strategically why, after 9/11, we had a preemptive policy, we had weapons of mass destruction, every intel agency in the world said Saddam’s got these things, I tried all that, it didn’t permeate.So I asked them a question. I said, ‘Have you ever stopped and asked yourself — because you guys, you’re so mad at this country, you think the world hates this country, and you think this country is so corrupt — have you ever stopped and asked yourself this question: How, in less than 250 years, has the American population built the most prosperous, the most powerful, the most advanced civilization ever?
The Europeans have been around thousands of years longer than we have — the Asians much longer than that — and yet we run rings around every one of them, and everybody else, too. It’s not even close. It’s not a contest in any way that you want to measure. ‘So how can it be,’ I asked them, ‘that less than 300 million Americans can rule the world as it never has been ruled before, in less than 250 years of existence? Have you ever really stopped to ask yourself this question?’ And the answers I got, ‘Well, there’s no question that this is the greatest country on the planet, but invading other countries is not the way to lead the world.’ I said, ‘Get Iraq out of your mind. I’m talking about something much larger here that I want you to think about. I’m asking you why this has happened, how it has happened. I want your opinion on how it’s happened, forget Iraq. It’s not about that. This is crucial. The answer to this question is crucial to understanding the United States, to understanding the rest of the world, and how to make it all better. Can you get Iraq out of your mind?’These people are so obsessed with Iraq that they are embarrassed to be Americans. They think that the world hates us, which is not true. They buy totally into the media and Democrat Party Drive-By template. I kept telling them, ‘I’m not arguing with you. I’m asking for your opinion. I want you to think about something. I’m not trying to be confrontational.’ They think everything is confrontational. Iraq is totally irrelevant to the question. It is a much larger conceptual approach here.
So I stated it again. I said, ‘The rest of the world, all of it, has been around for — in terms of nation-states — thousands of years much longer than we have. The United States is less than 300 years old.’ It took me five times. ‘The United States is less than 300 years old. No population of people in any country has ever approached our economic prosperity in wealth, our power. No nation in the history of civilization has so dominated the world for good, as has the United States of America. We have liberated over a hundred million people from bondage and slavery. We feed the world. We clothe the world. We provide disaster relief in all circumstances to friend and foe alike. We’re the only nation on earth that can. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself how in human history this came about? What makes this possible?’I’m just giving you facts. How can you hate your country? How can you sit there and be embarrassed of your country over something like Iraq when you don’t even understand what that is really all about? But throw it out of the equation. How can your love for your country be so fragile? How in your personal life can you run around and not care what people think, and yet when it comes to the United States of America, you get all upset if you think a bunch of reprobates hate our country? Some people should hate us. We pose a threat to them because of our goodness and because of our ideals. There’s some people who should hate us. A lot of people are just jealous of us because we are what we are, and they had all these years and decades and centuries and millennia and they haven’t been able to pull it off. Why do you let yourself end up hating your own country so much because of something like Iraq, which leads you to think that people around the world hate us, when none of this is actually true?’ This obviously continued, which I will continue in a moment.
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RUSH: As you know, we took a break here in the midst of my explaining to you an attempt to break through the protective shell, the cocoon in which many liberals live and which is their worldview. I kept trying to pound through that cocoon and I finally made it. I kept asking, ‘What is it? How do you explain in less than 250 years a population of less than 300 million people ruling the world like it’s never been ruled before? And I mean for good, economic prosperity. How do you explain this? With other civilizations having been around thousands of years, how has this happened?’ As I told you, I couldn’t get past Iraq. ‘I don’t care about that. Iraq! It’s no way to lead the world. I agree we’re a great country but we’re embarrassing ourselves and we’re ashamed.’I said, ‘No, no, no. Forget it. Forget it. Forget Iraq. Please forget Iraq. I’m talking about something larger.’ I said, ‘I know you love the country. Don’t think it’s a confrontation. I want to know how you think. I want to know what you think about.’So I finally got an answer, and the answer was, ‘Well, I think we were founded on principles that are based on freedom and enlightenment, for one thing.’I said, ‘Hot damn! Progress!’ I was stunned. I did not think… You know what I thought? I thought if we started talking about the founding, I thought we were going to get stories about how our founders were a bunch of racists, slave-owners, atheists, and agnostics. I thought I’d get the usual PC, multicultural tripe that is being taught out there now, but I did not.And then the liberal I was talking to said, ‘Well, but the principles of this country are greater than the men that wrote them down.’
I said, ‘Whew. Okay, we’re getting close now to what I originally thought.’ So I was getting a little bit depressed now. I got an answer that was fairly close to being accurate, but then the answer had to be qualified by saying that the people who wrote the principles down, eh, were not that big a deal. So I said, ‘Really? It’s interesting that you say that.’ I said, ‘You know, what happened in Philadelphia in 1776 was a miracle. Divine inspiration had to have been there. The principles may be bigger than the men who wrote ’em down, but they did write them, and they were not racists, and they were not bigots, whatever else the PC crowd teaches today.’ I then further pointed out — and this is when I started taking giant strides — I said, ‘Our founding principles, which you just proclaimed great, were not ‘liberal,’ as defined by today’s liberalism. Today’s liberals are not tolerant. They are not interested in freedom. They do not believe in God. They want God out of as much of our culture as possible.’
‘Well, God wasn’t part of the founding of this country!’ And I started getting a knee-jerk reaction.
I said, ‘Have you read the Declaration of Independence? ‘One nation under God…Creator,’ the Pledge of Allegiance? Clearly the founders of this country believed in God and believed that we were all created and that we were all created equal. ‘Certain unalienable rights, among them, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.’ Life, liberty, pursuit, these words mean things. You say that the principles are bigger than the people that wrote ’em down, but it took people to write them down. Where did they get the inspiration? Where did they get the intelligence? They were great people that put this country together, a country that stood the test of time like no other country in the history of civilization. Today’s liberals are none of the Founding Fathers. Today’s liberals are not capitalists as constituted today. They are socialists.’
This liberal said, ‘Well, I agree with you about some of this stuff.’
‘Well, you should agree with me about all of it, because I’m right, and the future of our country depends on maintaining the institutions and traditions that built this country, and in order to preserve these traditions and institutions, we’ve got to understand their origin. We must admit and be honest about what they are. Today’s liberals do, and they are trying to tear them down. Today’s liberals want to tear down these traditions and institutions and then remake the country in their own image. Iraq is not a factor in the demise of our country. If there is to be a demise of our country, it is because we will lose control of maintaining the traditions and institutions that made this a great country, a great culture, a great society, a great population. Iraq has nothing to do with this. It’s all happening from within. Iraq’s ancillary in the sense that it’s being used to try to convince as many Americans that the country is not worth preserving as we’ve known it.’
So the liberals that I was talking to started talking about Republicans and Democrats.
I said, ‘Will you forget Republicans and Democrats for a second? Who said anything about Republicans and Democrats? You people have got to stop acting knee-jerk! You gotta start listening to what I’m saying and reacting to that. I’m talking about conservatives and liberals; I’m talking about traditionalists versus secularists. I’m talking about people who hate the way America is today, versus people who love it and want to preserve it. You gotta get out of your head the idea that I am attacking you.’ I told them, ‘We all have the same wish. We all have the same desire: all liberals, all us conservatives. We want to preserve the country. We want America to remain America, and we want to leave it for our descendants as we inherited it from our forbearers. Our arguments are about how to do it,’ and in the argument phase here, we actually learn that perhaps we don’t want the same thing in terms of preserving the traditions and institutions because today’s liberals and socialists do want to tear ’em down. They have been imbued with guilt over prosperity.
‘It’s not fair we have so much. It’s not fair because we haven’t done it through any greatness of our own, Mr. Limbaugh. We’ve stolen it! We’ve stolen all the oil from these countries around the world. We’ve stolen their diamonds. We’ve stolen this, and then we waste all of the resources.’ This is what they’ve been taught.
I said, ‘No, you’ve got it totally backwards. The problem with the world is not America. The problem with the world is the lack of equal distribution of capitalism, and it’s just that simple. What it is that makes this country unique from any other set of population centers, countries, nations, whatever you want to call ’em, is two things. A: Our founding documents — and what’s in the founding documents? The documented recognition that we are all created by God and that we all have certain inalienable rights. That means it’s part of our yearning spirit. It’s part of our creation. That is liberty, a yearning to be free. We don’t want to be bound up. We don’t want to be shut up. We don’t want to be constrained. We are human beings. We’re explorers. We’re researchers. We’re pioneers. We don’t want to be caged,’ and they understood this. Pursuit of happiness. Life is to be maximized and pursued in its full, and people are to get as much out of it as they are able, and they can’t do it with shackles around their ankles. They can’t do it with governments that hold them in contempt. They can’t do it with leaders that think they have no brains. People are going to be constrained by people who think they have no ability to do things, so they’re going to want to do everything for them. The right to life. We’re all created equal. Right to life.
Those definitions of our creation and our freedom are what set us apart from virtually every nation on the face of the earth. I don’t know if you know this or not: Nothing against the Brits, they don’t even have a constitution. They do not have one. The European Union, they’re trying to write one, but it’s a bunch of commie libs. It’s a disaster. Nothing but a PC manual and digest, and that is how we’ve stood the test of time. It is those three things that are under assault by today’s left. The right to life, the pursuit of happiness. You’re not supposed to be happy because if you’re happy while somebody’s not happy, it’s not fair. And if your pursuit of happiness offends somebody or robs somebody else of their happiness, we can’t have that. No, because the liberals today want misery equally because that’s the only way we can all be equal. So we have to spread misery as equally as possible. We can’t humiliate anybody. This is why the country’s under assault, not Iraq. Not the war on terror, not the fact that the rest of the world hates us. The fact the rest of the world hates us is bogus, but it’s irrelevant anyway if it were the case, because it’s their problem, because we’re a great nation. If we’re going to run around and try to remake ourselves satisfy every little slimeball dictator, or every Western European socialist who for some reason is unhappy with us, then we’re going to cease to exist as we’ve known it — and that’s part of what today’s left wants.
I said, ‘Here’s how you need to look at Iraq, since you keep bringing up Iraq. This is how you need to look at it. Let’s suppose. Let me just stipulate with you liberals that it was a mistake to invade. I don’t think so, but I’m going to stipulate it for you for this conversation, and I’m going to agree with you that this whole thing has been mismanaged from start to present. I’m even going to agree with you that Saddam Hussein wasn’t a threat and we had no business going in there.’
They said, ‘Good! Good!’
I said, ‘No, because that’s irrelevant.’
‘What do you mean it’s irrelevant? It makes us a bad country.’
‘No, it’s not irrelevant. We’re fighting the same people in Iraq that blew us up on 9/11. It’s the same people! I don’t care where they are. The fact is, what happened up ’til now is irrelevant because we are there, and we are fighting the enemy that you claim to hate: Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda. Question. Let me ask you people this.’ I had their attention at this point, by the way. ‘Does it make any sense at all for the United States of America to leave in defeat without taking care of the business we are presented with at present?’ I said, ‘It is what it is. I have this phrase, and I use it to remind myself of things to stay grounded in reality: ‘It is what it is.’ If we pull out of there defeated, can you imagine what we will face down the road from these Islamofascists? We have to defeat these people. There is no alternative. If we are to remain the United States of America, for our own future, our own safety, we have to defeat them wherever they are. It doesn’t matter if it’s Iraq, if it’s Nicaragua, or it’s Venezuela. Wherever they are, they have to be stopped! I don’t care what anyone else thinks of us right now. This is about national security, preserving the nation that you claim to love. Our vital interests and security are at stake there, and here! We’re the United States. We don’t lose unless people like John Kerry are in charge.’
That didn’t go over well.
‘If we start waving the white flag and we leave, we’re inviting more attacks in this country. We’re never going to get another nation to join us as an ally, and we’re going to have to take these people on at some point. Do you think we’re just going to walk out? Let’s say we leave. We wave the white flag. We get what you want: we pull out of Iraq and the rest of the world loves us. We start getting attacked on our own soil. The terrorists are really emboldened. Their morale is way up. If they start attacking us, are you going to say, ‘We need to leave America and let them have it?’ At some point even you libs are going to realize they’re going to have to be defeated, and if we don’t do it now, we’re going to have to do it at some point. If we wait, the challenge is going to be even tougher,’ and then I hit ’em with Undeniable Truth of Life #20. They just cringed, but I had ’em: ‘Ours is a world governed by the aggressive use of force.’ It is not governed by peace movements, feel-good movements, and all of that. I said, ‘If we retreat like the Democrat Party and the liberals of this country want us to do today, we’re only going to have to face these people down the road when it’s your kids that will be facing them.’
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