RUSH: I want to talk to you about this speech that McCain gave yesterday in a general sense, particularly this League of Democracies proposal that first surfaced recently when he wrote an essay for Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations. Basically, as my good buddy Andy McCarthy at National Review Online points out, the whole purpose of the League of Democracies is to subvert the UN and do what it’s supposed to do. Sounds good, right? Until you realize, if you listen to what McCain said yesterday, he wants to institutionalize as part of the League of Democracies the European Union’s ideas on global warming and other such things. It got me to thinking. You go back throughout modern history in the modern era — Teddy Roosevelt forward, and you could probably go back even further than that. He had trouble making this point if you use Lincoln. You might have been able to use Lincoln for this, because he was so, so concerned on preserving the union, therefore the nation. All the way through Kennedy, Harry Truman, FDR — even McCain’s hero, Teddy Roosevelt.
I think McCain’s walking around thinking he’s Teddy Roosevelt, by the way, but that’s (sigh) for another time. Kennedy, Harry Truman, Eisenhower, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, all of these presidents, whatever else they were, had the notion that the United States of America was ‘the last best hope’ of earth, and, as such, they believed in the supremacy of the United States as a world superpower and that we use this power not only for our own security and defense, but for good around the world: to liberate the oppressed, to feed the hungry, all of this. When did this change? It changed in ’76, 1976, when Jimmy Carter was elected. You might argue with me about this on some previous presidents, but for the most part you would lose. Jimmy Carter was essentially the first American president that did not have this notion of American exceptionalism, of America as a superpower. Jimmy Carter tried to give it away. Jimmy Carter — and he’s still today, as an ex-president, is running around as often as he can berating and criticizing this country.
Then we had Reagan, and we got rid of Carterism, and we got Bush 41, and he maintained the concept of American superpower status, leader of the free world. You look at Carter. If Reagan had never been elected, we would have never defeated the Soviet Union. We would have never brought down the Berlin Wall because Carter and people like him in that era didn’t think it was wise to do so. They wanted another superpower, because they believed in this notion that our power would be checked and that that would be stabilizing. Then we have Bush 41, and we got to Clinton. Clinton had people in his administration like Madeleine Albright, and of course the whole notion of American exceptionalism went by the wayside. We had to start sharing our adventures and sharing our objectives with Europeans. Hell, the whole country was bought by Indonesians with these funny money campaign donations and so forth. Bush 43 and back to the concept of American exceptionalism.
There have been two presidents so far, Carter and Clinton, who did not subscribe to the notion of American exceptionalism, American superpower status. Now, what is so frustrating is that the Republicans have nominated somebody who has the same sort of attitude about American supremacy and greatness and exceptionalism that we found with Jimmy Carter, that we found with to a certain extent, Clinton. All of this talk, pandering to the hate-America crowd, whether they’re democracies or not. We know that in Great Britain and the European Union there are a lot of democracies, and from time to time they hate us. They hated us when Bush was president. They hated us during the Iraq war. They’ve had elections, however, in Germany and France. Those sentiments have changed dramatically, but those sentiments are not being pandered to by McCain. It’s the other people in Europe and the other democracies around the world that have big problems with us, and their problems are born of jealousy and envy. We’re bigger, we’re more powerful, we’re freer — and of course they want to bring us down to size and limit our influence and so forth just because they do.
Senator McCain’s speech yesterday turned off anybody who believes in conservative principles, and everybody who’s sick and tired of pandering to the hate-America crowd. If you don’t like calling them the hate-America crowd, just pandering to the people who think that we’re the problem in the world. We are the solution! The United States is the solution to the problems of the world. We are not the cause. And pandering to these people even if it’s the League of Democracies, doing so by accepting their intonations on global warming and all these other left-wing issues to show that, ‘Well, we’re big and we’re powerful, but we’re not going to squash and stomp you. To show you how cooperative we are, we want you to like us and so forth.’ So what’s the point? What’s the point of pandering to this bunch if what’s in our best interests is subordinated? And I’m telling you, it is not in our best interests to have a president of the United States that accepts the hoax of manmade global warming and the ‘repairs,’ the ‘fixes,’ because it’s economic devastation and it is loss of freedom. It is loss of liberty, and it is expansion of government.
If the GOP had a nominee who had a consistent record — and I know ‘if’ is for children. I’m just doing this to illustrate. If the Republican Party had a nominee who had a consistent record on conservative policies and principles, not just good here and maybe awful there; that candidate right now would be kicking the crap out of these leftists in the polls, because that candidate would be kicking the crap out of these people in the midst of their own infighting and pointing it out! That’s the kind of candidate who inspires and unites. I know Senator McCain thinks he’s going to unite and energize his base, but I don’t know how much he really cares about the base, after having heard that speech yesterday; talking about appealing to Europeans, closing Guantanamo Bay, managing the private sector. If that kind of talk is what he thinks is necessary to be elected, well, we’ll just have to wait and see. Some might say his base is not us. Some might say his base is moderates and independents, and he cares a great deal about that base.
He will court that base lavishly. Now, the war on terrorism not only includes the battle of Iraq. It’s broader than that. We’re fighting worldwide terrorism. We have to deal with this enemy in Iran, Pakistan, Africa, and it’s not clear how Senator McCain would do that. It’s not clear how McCain would strengthen the military. I haven’t heard enough about how he’s going to deal with military spending, whether he’s going to increase it. In many years that he was in Congress he spent far more time arguing for terrorist rights than increasing military spending, such as this, ‘We’ve gotta stop torture, no waterboarding,’ and all of this sort of thing. I mention all this because I want you to know that I understand how everybody feels after that speech yesterday, and it is problematic. I’ll tell you what I’m bouncing off of. We had a call in the last hour who said that Operation Chaos is going to give us the exact opposite of what we want, and I disagree with that.
Operation Chaos is providing a golden opportunity here to wipe out both these candidates and this party, because the Democrat Party is exposing itself once and for all in full color, 24/7, for what it is. It can’t unify anybody. It’s filled with a bunch of racists, sexists, liars, insincere, inexperienced, incompetent people. That’s what the Democrat Party is showing everybody — and Operation Chaos was designed to make sure that Obama did not get momentum after Ohio and Texas, which would have caused party leaders to lean on the Clintons even more. They probably wouldn’t have gone out, who knows, but that’s the past and we can’t rewrite it. The fact is, she won Ohio and Texas. That has motivated her to stay in, and now you’ve got Clinton threatening to kneecap the guy, do a ‘Tonya Harding.’ Well, the Clinton campaign: Barack is now responding. This is a golden, golden, golden opportunity — and I, frankly, I scour the news. As you people know, I am relentless in show prep. Most of my waking hours are spent paying attention, and I’ll be damned if I can find out from anybody at a high level of leadership in the Republican Party just what the hell they stand for today.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let me give you an example here of what I’ve been talking about. This morning in Raleigh, North Carolina, Hillary Clinton delivered a speech on the economy. This is a portion of the absolute insanity and incompetence that she put on display.
RUSH: A 3 a.m. economic crisis? The phone didn’t ring at 3 a.m. throughout the Clinton presidency according to her records. This woman is no more qualified to run the economy — this is the kind of lie that is far more egregious than her lie about encountering snipper fire when she got off the plane in Tuzla. She tried nationalizing health care. It was an abomination, and after it happened, she was relegated to the East Wing where she had to sit there and have tea and crumpets with Mrs. Putin and whatever other wife of a dignitary showed up. This woman has no more clue how to run the health care industry than she does how to run the oil industry. Look at the enemies here: insurance companies, drug companies, oil companies, student loan companies, every company is her enemy, and she is suggesting here that we’re going to get even. These people hate capitalism. This is an all-out assault on capitalism. We’ve heard this phrase since the late eighties, ‘One paycheck away from being homeless,’ trying to paint a picture of the US economy that is also a giant lie.