RUSH: I sent out a test e-mail to a bunch of friends, I said, “Look, I’ve kind of been out of it.” I got to play golf with Jack Nicklaus yesterday, by the way, at the Ernie Els for Autism charitable fundraiser out here at PGA National where they played the Honda Classic. (interruption) Well, I had my moments in my game, yeah. It was fun. It was a good day. The problem with Japanese food, Snerdley, is there’s not enough food, it’s not that there’s radiation in it. Anyway, I sent a bunch of people a test e-mail, “Hey, I’ve kind of been out of it. Can somebody tell me why we’re in Libya?” Nobody knows. The regime’s put out two or three different reasons why. Well, why do you think we’re in Libya, Snerdley?
By the way, greetings, folks, great to be back with you. El Rushbo here at 800-282-2882.
We got Farrakhan saying, “Who the hell do you think you are?” We got a bunch of liberal Democrats demanding the Nobel Peace Prize be withdrawn from Obama. A bunch of leftists are saying, “Gosh, he’s no different than Bush.” This is a final insult after not closing Club Gitmo and so forth. Why do you think we’re in Libya? (interruption) Not pressure from the press. Not pressure from the press. That’s where you’re wrong. He was not getting pressure from the press. I hold in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers — I love this — at Harvard they are discombobulated. Their whole worldview has just been turned upside down. This is a piece by David “Rodham” Gergen.
“After conversations with top players in Washington last week, mostly as I accompanied a group of Zuckerman Fellows –” boy, I wish I was part of that group, the Zuckerman fellows “– from Harvard on a field trip, here are some brief reflections on the mood there,” at Harvard. We got a whole CNN piece on what they’re thinking at Harvard. Remember, now, Harvard grooms people to do this, quote, unquote, the right way. That’s the purpose of Harvard, and the purpose of Yale, and Princeton and Brown, to train people to do this the right way, meaning the liberal right way.
“The head-snapping change in policy toward Libya has everyone guessing where the Mideast is heading, whether the U.S. has a good handle, and most of all, what President Obama is trying to achieve.” Get this next: “One irony, as a female friend put it, is that for years many of us believed that if only more women could gain power, the world would surely become more peaceful. Yet, we now see that the three people who talked Obama into using force against Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi were all women — Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power. Leading male advisers were opposed.” We’re talking about male liberals. Of course they were opposed! It’s the New Castrati. Of course the males were opposed. They’re sissies. And here’s the number one, well, the leader of the club. He happens to sit in the Oval Office. And his big problem — Stanley Kurtz lays this out in a just-posted piece at National Review Online — the problem with understanding this is like everything else, Obama doesn’t dare tell you what his real reason is. He doesn’t want it debated because the American people would oppose it. The American people do not want the US military used for Meals on Wheels.
Look, we’ve gone into Libya. We are in Libya for the purpose of protecting innocent civilians, right? That’s one of the reasons we’ve been told. Well, there are a hell of a lot more innocent civilians in Darfur. Ask George Clooney, who’s probably fuming about now. He’s been working for years to get this taking place in Darfur. We’re in Libya. He was barking up the wrong tree. If he’d known to go to Hillary, Samantha Power and Susan Rice, who knows, he could have another house in Darfur now. But no, we’re in Libya. You talk about protecting innocence civilians, how about Zimbabwe and Mugabe? Or North Korea, for crying out loud? If we’re looking at where civilians are mistreated and we want to go places to protect them, there are a lot of places that have more of them than in Libya. For that matter, folks, we have more innocent civilians under attack in Arizona than are under attack in Libya. And Barack Hussein Obama has been talked into going into Libya by three women while filing suit against another woman, the governor of Arizona. So now they’re really stepping in it.
If you go back to 2002 and you look at Obama explaining why he opposed Iraq, he’s doing everything here that he stated he opposed. He even laid out, I think it was in 2008, I’ll have to check this, but he even laid out the case for impeachment of a president. And by gosh if he hasn’t followed suit with his own stated views on presidential impeachment. David “Rodham” Gergen: “What is the president’s endgame in Libya? And what is his strategy for the Middle East more generally? Who can say for sure?” You don’t understand. Folks, for them to ask them, to admit they’re asking it at Harvard — this is the place with all the answers. This is the place where half the State Department went to school. This is the place where the Pentagon went to school, other than the various war colleges. Our president is from this place. And they just can’t figure it out. They are distressed.
So we got, okay, protection of innocent citizens, and then they said we’re gonna get rid of Khadafy. No, we’re not gonna get rid of Khadafy. The Pentagon has a whole different stated reason than what the White House says we’re doing there. We’re gonna get rid of Khadafy. No, we’re not gonna get rid of Khadafy. Some have argued we’re going in there to save Obama’s face because he said two weeks ago Khadafy’s gotta go. There was a problem. Khadafy didn’t go. And you don’t diss Obama. American president says, “You are out,” and the guy stays there and counts his money. But whatever, folks, is going on, I’ll tell you this. It’s patently obvious that this entire operation is spearheaded by people who do not believe that the United States is the solution to problems in the world. We are being led in a policy or series of policies have been put together by people who believe that the United States is the problem in the world, not the solution.
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RUSH: Let me read a little bit to you of this piece just posted at around 10:30 this morning by Stanley Kurtz at National Review Online. For people trying to figure out why we’re doing this and why there’s such murkiness, there’s a reason. There’s a reason for the murkiness. Kurtz has written a piece. I forget the title of it, but I interviewed him for an issue of the Limbaugh Letter. He has a great book on Obama and what motivates him, who inspired him and all that. “[F]or years, Samantha Power…” Now, you just heard her name from David “Rodham” Gergen writing at CNN. Samantha Power, Hillary, and Susan Rice. These are the three people wearing jockstraps in this regime that encouraged action, military action in Libya — and he was stunned.
Everybody thought that women in power would make a more “peaceful” world. I mean, how ridiculous is that? How ridiculous has every tenet of feminism always been? This is from Harvard, the supposed citadel of unique intelligence? What an insulting thing to say! More women in power would lead to a more peaceful world? What the hell does that mean? Ask any kid who had a mother about “peace” growing up, for crying out loud. Who was the disciplinarian most of the time? I marvel at the presumptions and the narratives these people have. Remember, these are the people that believed it was how young children were raised that determined whether they ended up masculine or feminine.
So it’s people like this that gave little Johnny pink rooms, Barbie dolls and all that; and gave little Sally GI Joe and all the military stuff to see what would happen, and guess what? Little Johnny turned out to be a hellion-on-wheels little boy despite the fact they put him in a pink bedroom with a bunch of Barbie dolls. And these are the smartest people among us. These are the elites. These are the ruling class. “[F]or years,” writes Stanley Kurtz, “Samantha Power, a prominent advocate of humanitarian [military] intervention and a key backer of our action in Libya, has been a powerful member of Obama’s foreign policy team. In 2005, Obama contacted Power after reading her book on genocide.
“There followed a long conversation, after which Power left Harvard to work for Obama, quickly emerging as his senior foreign policy advisor. It seems reasonable to conclude from his long-term relationship with Power that Obama shares her interest in making humanitarian military interventions more common.” Think Meals-on-Wheels. “Yet the president has said little about this, and the obvious policy implications of his ties with Power are rarely drawn.” In other words, this is probably the first time you’re probably hearing why Obama likes Samantha Power. There’s an ideological link. Think Alinsky.
“In his biography of Obama, David Remnick describes the beginnings of the Power-Obama relationship thus: ‘Obama did not strike Power as a liberal interventionist or a Kissingerian realist or any other kind of ideological ‘ist’ except maybe a “consquentialist.” In foreign policy, Obama said, he was for what worked.’ Here we have the classic protective presentation of Obama. The future president…” Oh, speaking of that, where did I put this? Oh! Talk about “the classic protective presentation of Obama.” Oh, I gotta find this. Oh, gee, it’s the most syrupy thing. I’ll have to print it out again. I have lots of stacks here. But it is the most syrupy explanation of what Obama is doing and how brilliant he is at it and how he can “multitask.”
Oh! He was at a dinner someplace and was getting updates on the American jet that was shot down and it’s a story about how there was a liaison, duty officer that was on the phone to somebody and this somebody was alerting a duty officer who then reported to Obama while he was dining at this official dinner the status of the downed US military jet, and whoever wrote the story was talking about, “This is an example of how Obama multitasks! This is an example of the Obama competence!” I said, “What the hell is this? What kind of special intelligence does it take to sit there at dinner and have somebody update you on what’s happening, with anything?”
So it’s a great illustration. I’ll find the exact story and read it to you. It’s a great illustration of this so-called “protective presentation of Obama.” What Kurtz is referring to here is David Remnick in the book as protective is these people all know he’s incompetent, or they all know that he is an unacceptable leftist ideologue. So they gotta protect that. Whatever it is — be it his incompetence or his extremism or his vast ultraliberalism — they have to protect it. He wouldn’t get elected otherwise. He wouldn’t be supported. It’s why Pelosi said, “We gotta pass the bill to find out what’s in” health care. It’s why Obama never did have a plan, because the whole objective (as it is with all prominent liberals) is to protect them, to deny knowledge, to make sure people don’t know who they really are, what they really believe.
So here we have this association with Samantha Power. She is an ideologue who believes in military intervention for humanitarian purposes. “The future president reads a book by a passionately ideological humanitarian interventionist and quickly hires her as his key foreign policy advisor. Yet the obvious ideological implications of this are left entirely unexplored. Instead we are quickly reassured that Obama is nothing but a pragmatist.” He knows what he’s doing and he’s so smart you couldn’t keep up. You don’t have — none of us have — the ability to understand what Obama’s doing.
You’re just gonna have to accept it: He sees a vision unlike any of us, and he is such a pragmatist. So don’t explore any of these ideologue relationships he’s got. Don’t explore the relationship with Reverend Wright, for example. “There is a germ of truth to the pragmatism claim. Obama doesn’t seem to have a single overarching strategic perspective. Instead he ‘pragmatically’ juggles competing sensibilities on foreign policy…” I would disagree with Kurtz there but I don’t have time to get into that. “Most of the commentary on Libya has focused on the tension between Obama’s apparent desire to displace Qaddafi and his reluctance to admit to it.
“But the chief reason for this intervention is the one that’s staring us in the face. Obama dithered when it was simply a matter of replacing Qaddafi, yet quickly acted when slaughter in Benghazi became the issue. What Samantha Power and her supporters want is to solidify the principle of ‘responsibility to protect’ in international law. … Yet Obama has so far been reluctant to fully explain any of this to either Congress or the American public, perhaps because he realizes that the ideological basis of his actions would not be popular if openly admitted.
“If Obama were a different sort of president, we would have all heard about ‘responsibility to protect’ long ago.” Not establish freedom, not do any of that. No. We’re there to protect the downtrodden. Well, as I say, folks, if that’s what we’re doing — if that’s the primary motivation — why aren’t we in Darfur, why aren’t we in North Korea, why aren’t we in Zimbabwe? In fact, somebody ought to tell the innocent civilians in Arizona that we send in the military to protect innocent civilians; because they’re under assault in Arizona, and this regime is doing nothing. So there’s an ideological tie here. It’s “intervention,” military Meals on Wheels.
Something the US population wants no part of.
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RUSH: I just love, ladies and gentlemen, reading about how we are only in Libya for oil. You know, it was Ed Markey from Massachusetts who said that we are only in Libya for oil. I wish we were in Libya for oil. I’m still waiting for our oil from Iraq at below market prices. I had to laugh when I saw Markey, we’re only there for the oil? I don’t know.
Folks, CNN over the weekend, a reporterette said that everybody she had talked to on the ground in Libya was grateful to America for the air attacks. She then specifically mentioned how impressed the Libyan rebels were with the presentation by Ambassador Susan Rice at the UN. You’ve seen pictures, right, of these ragtag rebels watching television, watching the proceedings at the UN? Yeah, I have, too. I’ve seen a lot of video of these rebels, whoever the heck they are, watching C-SPAN, or maybe it’s Al Jazeera, too, who knows, show us what’s happening at the United Nations. The rebels are very happy, CNN says so.
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