RUSH: The Democrats are still beside themselves over President Bush yesterday in Israel at the Knesset saying that Barack Obama — well, the Democrats are saying he was talking about Obama. The White House has denied that. Let’s go back to audio sound bite number four, Mike. This is the president yesterday in Jerusalem at the Knesset.
THE PRESIDENT: Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We’ve heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared, ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is: the false comfort of appeasement which has been repeatedly discredited by history. (applause)
RUSH: Yeah, yeah. Well, the Democrats are still — they are still — going bonkers over this. You know, ladies and gentlemen, one of the interesting things about this is that in a personal sense, Obama was not even charged. He’s out there defending himself for something he hasn’t even been accused of. Furthermore, all these people that are rising up in righteous anger over what the president said ostensibly about Obama are not denying that Obama said this, because he did say it — and we have it. They’re not denying he said it. They’re simply saying, ‘It’s untenable. It’s horrible. It’s un-American. It is outrageous to attack from foreign soil! Politics ends at the water’s edge!’ I listen to these people, and I want to pull my hair out. For the past five years they’ve been going all over the world, from Algore to Bill Clinton, and denouncing our Iraq strategy and trying to secure defeat. The Democrats in Washington, both House and the Senate, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have been proclaiming defeat and all of this. And they act like this is some huge effrontery? We have a montage here: Chris Dodd, Jamie Rubin, Pelosi, Bill Richardson, Harold Ford, a bunch of these people. These are the people who laud Jimmy Carter — these are the people who laud Algore and Bill Clinton — when they go abroad, when they are on foreign soil, and they attack their own country. All of a sudden now they’re back to ‘politics stops at the water’s edge,’ in anticipation of what they think will be a coming Obama administration that they want to shield from any sort of criticism at all. Here’s the montage.
CHRIS DODD: When presidents are out of country, people avoid attacking the president.
JAMIE RUBIN: The most ugly form of American politics brought to another shore.
NANCY PELOSI: You know, we have a protocol, that we don’t criticize the president when he is on foreign soil.
BILL RICHARDSON: Bad form in criticizing a presidential candidate on foreign soil.
HAROLD FORD: You don’t attack presidential candidates or presidents on foreign soil.
SUSAN RICE: A deliberate attack by the president on foreign soil.
ROBERT GIBBS: An unprecedented political attack on foreign soil.
JOHNNY EDWARDS: The president of the United States should not engaged [sic] in this kind of politics outside the shores of the United States. It’s just not right!
RUSH: Folks, I know, I know, I know what you’re all thinking, ‘How in the world can the media report this without ripping into these people?’ These are the people that have been doing this very thing ever since George Bush assumed office in 2001, and here they’re acting like they are as innocent and clean and pure as the wind-driven snow; this is some great offense that’s taken place and you are watching all this and you’re listening to all these Democrats, and you’re screaming, ‘Aaarrrgghh!’ like a Howard Dean scream, because you can’t believe it. The media is facilitating all this. This is a great lesson for you, which I think most of you probably learned by now already. The Drive-By Media and the Democrats are accomplices. They are in league together — and they, they have no doubt what their agenda is, and they have no compunction whatsoever about advancing it — and they don’t care what we think of them. They couldn’t care less. All the things tying our hands in knots, they don’t spend time on. They don’t care what we think of them. They couldn’t care less.
They’re not trying to be our friends. They’re not trying to show us that they’re reasonable. They are advancing an agenda, and we’re not, from our pseudo-conservative media to elevated levels of our Republican Party. We look at these people and say, for some reason, ‘We must show them that we’re good people, too. We must make sure they like us.’ So we abandon our agenda and become childlike in the effort to make all these people like us — and they sit there and they laugh at us. Well, they’re not laughing at you and me, but they’re laughing at other Republicans and these pseudo-conservative media types — and you know who you are, and you know who I’m talking about. They sit there and they laugh at us and they say, ‘We got these people wrapped around our little finger, a bunch of weak-kneed sissies.’ They just spout their party line pap. The Drive-By Media simply amplifies it and passes it along, and we sit here and say, ‘Where the hell is somebody standing up and pointing fingers at these people and calling them phony baloney, plastic banana, good-time rock-‘n’-roller liars?’
Let me ask you a question very simply, ladies and gentlemen. Imagine… We have conservatism and we’ve got neoconservatism. Why do we allow that to happen? And who are the neocons? Well, the neocons are ex-Democrats, by the way, who moved into the Republican Party along with Ronaldus Magnus. They are big hawks, but they also believe in a big, activist, ‘compassionate’ executive and government. So we have conservatism and neoconservatism. Imagine if there were a neo-Marxism or a neoliberalism. They wouldn’t permit it. Marx wouldn’t permit a neo-Marxism nor would liberalism permit a neoliberalism. But let’s pretend. Let’s pretend that there was a neoliberalism, in which a bunch of egghead liberals got together and said, ‘You know what? We’re still going to care about the kids and we’re still going to care about the poor and injustice and diversity and all that, saving the planet and all the pieties that we good Marxists care about. But we’re going to introduce a touch of the free market, too, to produce school choice, economic opportunity, increased income tax revenues, et cetera, in order to solve these problems.’
So, yeah, we’re still good liberals, but we’re going to have some neoliberals here who are actually conservatives. No self-respecting liberal would let ’em get away with it, ’cause it wouldn’t be Marxism anymore; it wouldn’t be liberalism anymore. But that’s exactly what we are allowing and have allowed to happen to conservatism. Ten years ago, 1998, would any of these pseudoconservative media types, the so-called ‘conservative elite,’ the intellectuals, would they have dared to say out loud that Ronald Reagan’s way was obsolete back in 1998? They may have thought it back then but they would not have said it, certainly not as a regular schtick as they are doing today. Nope. They had to call it ‘American greatness conservatism,’ or ‘neoconservatism’ or ‘compassionate conservatism’ or whatever Brooks, Kristol, and Barnes and Michael Gerson and the rest of them are calling it this week. Whatever their brand of conservatism is, they had to call it some neoconservatives. ‘We’re not Reagan conservatives. We’re neoconservatives. We’re smarter than Reagan.’ Now they’ve made enough progress in having the media brand them as the face of serious conservatism, and they’re out there feeling their oats.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Barack Obama, conducting a town meeting in Watertown, South Dakota, he’s up there with Tom Puff Daschle and he is criticizing, ‘John McCain and President Bush for ‘dishonest and divisive’ attacks in hinting that the Democratic presidential candidate would appease terrorists. Obama strongly responded Friday to the comments Bush made in Israel on Thursday and McCain’s subsequent words. Obama told a town hall meeting, ‘That’s the kind of hypocrisy that we’ve been seeing in our foreign policy, the kind of fear-peddling, fearmongering that has prevented us from actually making us safer.’ Obama said McCain had a ‘naive and irresponsible belief that tough talk from Washington will somehow cause Iran to give up it’s nuclear program and support for terrorism.” I could have predicted this, did predict this. This is only going to get worse. We’re dealing here with a messiah. Do you know what we cannot say about Barack Obama, by the way? Can I give you a little list of things we can’t say?
It used to be, when we all started here, when Barack finally hit the scene last summer the only thing we couldn’t mention were his ears. He went out there, actually told Maureen Dowd he’s very sensitive about his ears, and she said, ‘We’re trying to toughen you up.’ Hasn’t worked. Since then, when we could only not mention his ears, now we cannot talk about his mother, now we can’t talk about his father — I mean, he can. Now we can’t talk about his wife. Now we can’t talk about his preacher. Now we can’t talk about his voting record. And we dare not talk about his religion. And we don’t use the appeasement word, can’t say appeasement now. We can’t talk about color. We can’t talk about race. We can’t talk about lack of color. We can’t talk about his friends, mobsters and bombers, terrorists. We can’t talk about schooling. Can’t talk about his name. Can’t talk about his experience. Can’t talk about his income. Can’t talk about his flag pin. In the beginning it was just his ears. Now he’s a messiah, we can’t say anything about the guy without it being a mean-spirited personal attack.
In the meantime, Bush utters a universal truth. These people have a conniption fit because they know that the truth was told about liberalism worldwide in what Bush said. They have not denied, by the way, what Bush said. Nobody has denied from the Obama camp that he said what he said about meeting without preconditions with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. So here on the one hand we have this honorable campaign, filled with integrity. And now at a town meeting in South Dakota, the Democrat presidential nominee has just said that Bush and McCain are engaged in hypocrisy, fearmongering, fear peddling, being dishonest and divisive. See, this is the arrogance, the hubris of liberalism, criticize them, and you are divisive. Tell the truth about them, you’re divisive.
Here’s Nancy Pelosi. This is yesterday in Washington, she held a little presser. Unidentified reporter said, ‘You mentioned your trip to Israel. I’m wondering if you had any reaction today to the president’s speech in the Knesset, what he said there about appeasement and so forth.’
PELOSI: You know, we have a protocol, sort of a custom informally around here that we don’t criticize the president when he is on foreign soil. One would think that that would apply to the president, that he would not criticize Americans when he is on foreign soil. I think what the president did in that regard is beneath the dignity of the office of president and unworthy of our representation at that observance in Israel.
RUSH: Of course no mention of her trip to Syria. No mention of her effort to undermine US foreign policy while on foreign soil, and no reference to the fact that Bush is in Israel, 60th anniversary of the Jewish state. He could have been talking about Neville Chamberlain. He was talking about appeasing Hitler! And yet these people are so defensive, and they know he’s right! They had to announce this, they had to have their little fit to try to distract the criticism, because anything, a divisive attack on liberals equals the truth. Here’s Obama February 21st of this year in Austin, Texas at a presidential debate.
OBAMA: I would meet without preconditions, although Senator Clinton is right that there has to be preparation. It is very important for us to make sure that there was an agenda and on that agenda was human rights, releasing of political prisoners, opening up the press, and that preparation might take some time, but I do think that it’s important for the United States not just to talk to its friends but also to talk to its enemies.
RUSH: He would meet without preconditions. He said it. These are his own words. This is why they’re having this fit. This is why they’re going nuts, because he said it. What Bush said reminds everybody what Obama’s foreign policy is going to be. You know, some days, folks, I don’t think it matters. There are so many damn morons in this country willing to vote Democrat. I’m watching some of this town meeting Obama’s got, granted it’s in South Dakota, but that’s the state that threw Tom Daschle out, state that George Bush won. Now, you can stack the deck with the members of your town meeting, but he’s got a couple farmers up there, and when you know the subsidies we’re giving farmers in the farm bill and you got a couple farmers, ‘What are you going to do for me if I lose everything?’ It’s just like the ponytail guy all over again. These people ask Obama what he’s going to do for them.