Why President Bush Went to China

RUSH: We’ll go to Baltimore. This is Marsha. Marsha, it’s one of my all-time favorite top ten female names. Nice to have you with us.

CALLER: Oh, nice to talk to you, Rush, nice to talk to you.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: Rush, I wanted to tell you that I think it’s disgraceful that President Bush went to communist China, and why couldn’t he have a line in the sand saying no? You know, that’s an awfully repressive —

RUSH: Now, wait a second, wait a second, I kind of disagree with this. Why should we send our athletes, then? If the president isn’t going to go, if we’re going to say it’s inappropriate for the president to go, and, by the way, the trip was deductible. He had some meetings with Hu Jintao, and you never know what was discussed there, but I mean if we’re not going to send the president, we gotta not send the team, right?

CALLER: Well, if you want to look at it that way. However, the Germans sent a team and the chancellor didn’t go. She didn’t go.

RUSH: That’s right. I forgot. I forgot. We’re supposed to be imitating the Europeans. You have a good point. That’s right. And Sarkozy didn’t go. Sarkozy’s world savior number two behind Obama because he’s over there solving the crisis after Obama told him to solve it in Georgia.

CALLER: Well, it’s just that they suffer so much there. It’s such a repressive — their faces are like stone —

RUSH: Look, I know exactly what you’re saying. Let me get serious. I’m kind of in a jocular mood. This is the second night in a row I’ve had no more than three hours sleep and you know —

CALLER: I’m sorry.

RUSH: No, don’t apologize. I’m thinking of making it a routine. My mind seems to work faster and I’m always in a funny little giddy mood. But this is really serious. We have the dressing up here. I know what you’re getting at, and you’re worried that the president is, and our presence is, sanctioning this. We have the dressing up of an oppressive regime to make it look like something it’s not. That opening ceremony and all the happy-go-lucky funny and happy little Chinese children running around, they don’t show you what’s going on in Tibet; they don’t show you the political prisoners; they don’t tell you what they’re doing to the Falun Gong, and we have to sit there and listen to the syrupy, soap opera lingo from the NBC commentators telling us what a wonderful place it is. The ChiComs are pulling off something here for people that don’t know history. They’re doing exactly what Hitler wanted to do with the Olympics he had in 1936, and that’s put a face on his regime that is 180 degrees out of phase with reality. And that’s what the ChiComs are doing as well. By the way, I was very gratified, I read George Will today. He saw that opening ceremony the exact same way I did: totalitarian sameness.

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: The elimination of the individual, the elimination of even individual identities. Nothing but 15,000 identically dressed, identically performing, synchronized performances, identical looking people.

CALLER: It’s unbelievable.

RUSH: Well, no, it’s totally believable.

CALLER: It’s sad.

RUSH: They’ve learned how to use our media. Mr. Snerdley, our program observer has a question. Do you mind if I ask him a question, Marsha?

CALLER: No.

RUSH: What’s the question, Snerdley? Now, see, Marsha, Snerdley is very upset with you, he wanted me to pass on to you, ‘What, we’re supposed to pull out like Carter did and not go to the Moscow Olympics?’

CALLER: Well, this is my opinion. I don’t know — you’ve kind of jumbled my thoughts a little bit, but I felt that President Bush shouldn’t have gone.

RUSH: Well, it’s too late now.

CALLER: Of course, yeah.

RUSH: He did go and you can’t throw him out of office because that’s going to happen constitutionally.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: So there’s really nothing you can do but feel bad about it and that’s not productive.

CALLER: No. No. But what can we do about communist China? Just pretend it doesn’t exist or what?

RUSH: No, they own most of our debt, we are engaging them in a lot of economic activity. In fact, China is an interesting case study because the Chinese are doing their best to maintain their oppressive regime while at the same time importing as much capitalism as they can. They have no choice but than to do that. Communism cannot keep those leaders in power, and that population of a billion people fed. It just can’t do it, unless they start building walls around the country and start killing people that try to get out of there, which they do, by the way. They oppress religions that they disagree with. They don’t like any religion except communist, the state is the religion. But Hu Jintao, the premier and the leading ChiCom, has a daunting challenge. Like every leader, he wants to stay in office, he wants to stay in power, and he cannot have a citizenry that revolts. Now, they take care of a lot of this in the school system, like the national anthem, the hymn to the motherland that was sung. Those people are raised — this is the big problem that some Americans have with our public school system here, although on a smaller scale — every Chinese child is raised to believe that their god is the state and that their provider and guarantor is the state. They worship the state. When people don’t worship the state and are renegades, that’s when the tanks run them down in Tiananmen Square and that sort of thing, and that hasn’t changed, you just don’t see it as much.

American liberalism is much the same outlook in terms of where all benefits, wants, and needs, should come from. They should not come from individual labor. They should come from the government mandating that everybody get an equal share of all these things, and only then will we be a perfect nation. But Hu Jintao cannot run his entire country that way. There are a billion people. That requires a lot of commerce, a lot of jobs, he’s gotta have people working. His biggest challenge is finding and creating 25 million new jobs a year and keeping them out of the cities. He’s gotta find jobs out in the countryside in the hinterlands and keep them out of the cities. The cities are packed and overcrowded, polluted, and if those people come to the cities for work, then there’s even more strain on the energy policies and the production. They wouldn’t be able to keep up with it. So he’s got huge problems. So he’s missing capitalism in with the oppressive regime. The Russians failed at this with glasnost and perestroika. But the ChiComs have done it a little bit wiser. They have invested in the United States. They have bought a lot of our Treasury bill debt, and they have a little power over us in that way, and they’re at the same time ginning up their military, and they’re forming alliances with people that are our sworn enemies, primarily Iran and Middle Eastern countries, and they are sort of a buffer between us and North Korea as well. But if it came down to it they would side with the North Koreans over us — and if it comes down to Taiwan — (laughing) you know, I’ll give you an example here to think of. The ChiComs are certainly watching what’s happening with the Russian and Georgian situation. They have a similar situation with Taiwan.

They’ve wanted Taiwan back ever since the forties. It’s nothing, it’s a tiny little island compared to the mainland of China, but it represents renegades. It represents people who fled the mainland with Chiang Kai-shek, and want no part of communism. We have a treaty with Formosa, Taiwan, to defend them if the ChiComs attack. You better understand the ChiComs are no doubt watching how the rest of the world reacts to the Russian aggression in Georgia, and if they see that the United States, nor anybody else, is gonna do anything about that other than shout a bunch of words and send in a bunch of food and medicine, then they’re going to make the calculation at some point they’re going to be able to get away with taking Taiwan back. If they do it, it will not be because they need it for anything strategically. They’re going to take it because they don’t want people who are Chinese who are not communists who are living in freedom so near to the coastline of China. It’s a bugaboo with them, it’s going to always be, and they’re going to at some point in the future, they are going to try to take it back just on principle.

So we can’t disengage from China. We can’t get ourselves out of the world. I remember the 1984 presidential campaign with Gary Hart(pence) and Walter Mondull. I was watching the debate with the guys one night, and they were arguing who would get us out of the world first. Mondull said, ‘I’ll get us on out of South Africa,’ and Hart(pence) would try to upstage with getting out of some country. We cannot disengage from the world. We just can’t do it. So the situation is what it is and we have to make the best of the fact that capitalism is finding its way into China and hope that that has some undermining effect of the repressive regime down the road. But that’s something that human intelligence and other operations can foment and help. That’s what we’re actually trying to do with Iran, that’s a very friendly population toward the United States and it’s why we’re not committing military action there because they don’t want to anger the population there holding out hope that somebody will come to their rescue and take them away are from the footprints of the mullahs. Marsha, thanks for the call.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Vincent in Cranston, Rhode Island. I’m glad you called, sir. Nice to have you on the EIB Network.

CALLER: Hey, how you doing?

RUSH: Very well.

CALLER: Mega New England Patriots dittooooos.

RUSH: Thank you. Thank you very much.

CALLER: My comment was on a call a while ago about why the president appeared in China. I mean, you can’t do something out of general love for your country anymore, people just don’t believe it? I don’t — I don’t understand that.

RUSH: You mean president went over there because he loves America, loves —

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: — the athletes, and wanted to show support? I, frankly, got the biggest kick out of watching Bush over there, just as an average fan waving his little flag and posing. He posed with all the athletes; he posed with the teams. He especially went down there and got very up close to the women’s beach volleyball team. He knew where to go. He got photographed with the swimmers and so forth, and he’s in the stands. He’s not in some skybox. He’s with his wife and one of his daughters. Now, you know there were Secret Service around, but you couldn’t see ’em.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: They just looked like they were fans. He was smiling, pointing at them. He’s waving.

CALLER: The interview that they aired, he sounded phenomenal. He just knew exactly what to say. You know, he just sounded like (garbled)

RUSH: Is that the interview with Bob Costas?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: Yeah, how many race questions did Costas ask? That’s his favorite subject.

CALLER: (laughs) It was… I just remember that he answered. Everything he said was just, you know, right on point, which is phenomenal.

RUSH: It was good. I saw he was asked about the situation over in Georgia —

CALLER: Mmm-hmm. Yeah.

RUSH: — and what he’s doing with Hu Jintao and the ChiCom leadership.

CALLER: Mmm-hmm.

RUSH: Well, look, Vincent, I’m glad you waited to make that point because it is interesting. I did get a kick out of it. He’s a big sports fan anyway, but he just looked like he was really, really having a good time. Those pictures, I’m sure, were part and parcel of inspiring the audience as well.