RUSH: Listen to this. It speaks for itself.
OBAMA: Ronald Reagan’s efforts on arms control and embrace of perestroika not only improved relations with the Soviet Union but empowered dissidents throughout Eastern Europe.
RUSH: That is an out-and-out historical revisionist lie. Ronald Reagan’s efforts on arms control and embrace of Perestroika improved relations with the Soviet Union? We defeated the Soviet Union. I tell you, this guy just drives me batty.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
Now, here’s — this is — play this for you again. This is what he said this morning in his acceptance speech, among other things, at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony.
OBAMA: Ronald Reagan’s efforts on arms control and embrace of perestroika not only improved relations with the Soviet Union, but empowered dissidents throughout eastern Europe.
RUSH: What the hell is he talking about? ‘Improved relations’ with the Soviet Union? It was Reagan who refused to talk to Soviet leaders because they kept dying on him! Embraced perestroika? Does anybody really know what perestroika is? I got it from Gorbachev’s own damn book. By perestroika, Gorbachev meant retrenchment of Leninism. He was trying to save communism while it was falling apart. He was trying to do things that were incompatible. He was trying to — first place, he didn’t have the economy to keep up with us on this Strategic Defense Initiative; they just couldn’t keep up with us. They were a Third World country with a first-rate military. They had no food in the stores. They had a typical communist country. They had to build walls to keep people in their countries. But, you know, blue jeans showed up over there then copies of the TV show Dallas, and the Russian people began to see an America unlike that which they were told about. They were constantly lied about what life was like here. And then they loved blue jeans, they saw Dallas, and somebody snuck pirated copies of Dynasty in there, and that’s all she wrote.
So the people started demanding freedom and American prosperity and Gorbachev wanted to stay in power so he tried to dole out a little bit of freedom — he called it perestroika, but that’s not what he was intending to do — but still strengthen communism. The two don’t go together. You cannot parcel out freedom and still strengthen communism. It just doesn’t work. So the floodgates opened. Reagan — we defeated them without even firing a shot. To say that Reagan ’embrace[d]’ perestroika… His efforts on arms control, efforts on arm control, does anybody remember Reykjavik in Iceland? There was a summit, and Gorbachev and Reagan met. And Gorbachev proposed getting rid of everything. Reagan said, ‘Screw you. I know you’re not gonna’ — he walked out! Embrace of arms control?
You know, I wonder, is that really what he thinks happened during the Reagan years? I remember in his book, one of his books, he pretty much says that Reagan is what made him want to get into politics to change America. Remember that passage, and I’ve read it to you a number of times where his first job in some — Was it a law firm? Somebody sitting in his cubicle? — it’s a private sector enterprise. I forget what it was. But he writes about feeling like he was ‘behind enemy lines.’ And then he talks about having to change what Reagan and his minions were doing. Which was cutting taxes, growing the economy, expanding personal liberty and freedom. Those are the things that inspired Obama to get into American politics to want to change. Now, who was it — it’s entirely possible that throughout his educated life he’s been told that Reagan embraced perestroika, that Gorbachev was responsible for the end of the Cold War and that arms control, but at the time, the left hated Reagan because he didn’t believe in arms control. He always knew the Soviets would cheat on it! He wanted to bury the Soviets! He wanted to wipe them out! He did not want to get —
This is just one of the most amazing passages. I mean, he went in to record his Saturday radio presidential address, and he told a joke before he actually started recording the five-minute radio address, and he said (paraphrase), ‘Attention, Mr. Gorbachev, the bombing starts in five minutes.’ And it got out and the media had a cow! I mean, the left went absolutely nuts! And that was on the heels of Reagan having called them the ‘evil empire’ in the midst of all the Star Wars movies. And here comes little Barry: ‘Reagan’s efforts on arms control and embrace of perestroika not only improved relations with’ — Improved relations with the Soviet Union? And empowered dissidents? Empowered? The dissidents that mattered were in jail! It was called The Gulag Archipelago, and it was written about by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn!
I don’t know, folks. The Universe of Lies, Universe of Reality, it is clear. Let me read from Gorbachev’s — his own stupid book. ‘I stress once again, perestroika is not some kind of illumination or revelation. To restructure our life means to understand the objective necessity for renovation and acceleration, and that necessity emerged in the heart of our society. The essence of perestroika lies in the fact that it unites socialism with democracy and revives the Leninist concept of socialist construction, both in theory and in practice. Such is the essence of perestroika which accounts for its genuine revolutionary spirit and its all-embracing scope.’
Now, that’s from Mikhail Gorbachev’s own book, and I will guaran-damn-tee you that Ronald Reagan no more embraced that than he would have embraced flat-out, straight-out communism. By the way, perestroika was Gorbachev’s downfall. You cannot unite socialism and democracy. There will be a revolt — especially if you’re talking about an oppressed people. You want to bring democracy to an oppressed people? That means you’re going to have to give them some freedom which they haven’t had before, freedom that they’ve been lied to about that exists elsewhere in the world — that all came crumbling down in the person of Boris Yeltsin and a number of others over there. People forget there was an assassination attempt on Gorbachev when he was at what passes for the Soviet version of Camp David, some shack down there on the Black Sea or whatever it was. That’s where the assassination — Gorbachev — ‘they tried to assassinate the president, they tried to’ — which is common in communist countries, coups all the time.
This was way over the top, folks: ’embrace of perestroika.’ And don’t forget the companion was glasnost. Openness. That was all a sham. Look, these people are liberals, they’re leftists, and everything they do is a lie! Perestroika and glasnost, ‘the new opening of the previously closed Soviet system’ — was just the opposite. Obama calls that ‘transparency’ now, telling people lies about what you’re doing. This is just over-the-top unbelievably incredible. He can’t possibly believe it! He just — well, he can if he’s been taught that, if that’s what he’s been taught.
He’s talking to a bunch of Norwegians, too. Well, look it. The Europeans, the western Europeans, understand fully. They may still resent it, but they understand full well that it was the Pershing missiles placed there that preceded the SDI debate that led to the end of the Soviet Union, and Reagan did not back down. The Soviets doing everything they could to keep those missile bases, those launchers from being installed. And, of course, these little linguine spines over in Oslo were the beneficiaries of it. Along with the French, along with the Brits, the Danes, the Norwegians, the Swedish. So I just — this is why they want to get rid of old people, folks, people that remember the truth of things like this. They want to be able to rewrite history and say, ‘Reagan embraced perestroika, Reagan embraced communist reforms.’ They want us to believe — ‘and Reagan was big in arms control. Big, big.’ It’s just stunning to me and to anybody else who happens to know the truth about this.
In fact, listen to this. Now, this is kind of interesting. I don’t want to make too much out of this. Tina Brown, one of the doyennes of New York society and literature, she and her husband, Sir Harry Evans, quite dominant and prevalent. They are the Ben Bradlee and the Sally Quinn of the New York media social set. She has edited Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, she now has a website called The Daily Beast. And this is what she wrote on December 3rd at The Daily Beast: ‘It’s a strange paradox for a great wordsmith, but whenever Obama makes an important policy speech these days he leaves everyone totally confused. His first health-care press conference back in July triggered a season of raucous political Rorschach and left his hopeful followers utterly baffled about what they were being asked to support. Now White House envoys are being dispatched all over the globe to explain what the president really meant about the date when troops will or won’t be pulled out of Afghanistan… Does Obama create confusion on purpose? Is this his ‘process’ based on his confession that he’s a screen onto which people project things? Is it a strategy so that whatever bill trickles out of Congress or however many soldiers linger in Afghanistan, he can claim that the outcome is what he meant all along?… Or is it that there is so much subtext to every part of this message that the simple heads of the electorate are just not pointy enough to comprehend it? I’ — writes Tina Brown — ‘have come to the conclusion that the real reason this gifted communicator has become so bad at communicating is that he doesn’t really believe a word that he is saying.’ I think, at the risk of publicly humiliating her by agreeing with her, I will agree with her.
And this is why there’s no passion from the guy about anything. I’m sure that the guy’s got varicose veins, because without that he’s be totally colorless. This guy, I’m telling you, is a dryball. There’s no passion or emotion about any of his proposals, the things he supposedly cares about. And Tina Brown says, ’cause he doesn’t really believe a word he’s saying. ‘He couldn’t convey that health-care reform would somehow be cost-free because he knows it won’t be. And he can’t adequately convey the imperatives or the military strategy of the war in Afghanistan because he doesn’t really believe in it either.’ Which, she’s right. I mean, the war in Afghanistan is an inconvenience. He really, I think, is irritated that he has to deal with it.