RUSH: More on this CIA stuff. Obama releases half the story in his interrogation memos. Oh, how horrible a country we are. This is just terrible and it was a weighty decision. He had to think about it for so long and discuss it with a lot of people! Which is flat-out BS. He couldn’t wait to release these memos — and if the truth be told, if he gets the slightest chance to clear the path to his stupid, dumb idiots in Congress to prosecute former Bush administration officials, then he’s not going to stand in the way of it. You mark my words. This is all about cutting the USA down to size. David Axelrod says that the era of anti-Americanism isn’t cool anymore? Ha! It’s policy. Anti-Americanism is policy in the White House. Now, these CIA memos. There’s a second set. Vice President Cheney talked about them last night on Sean Hannity.
He’s seen them, and they show the success of these so-called extreme measures. You can call them torture, whatever you want to call ’em. Extreme measures, enhanced measures. But, folks, there’s a book I want to tell you about here in just a second, but there have to be — we just know this to be the case — there have to be lots of people who have sacrificed greatly in the field. We can never hear about them, and we can never hear about their success stories, but they’ve kept us safe. And I will guarantee you that the people in the field, CIA counterintelligence operatives, they feel betrayed. They have to feel betrayed. There was a giant pep rally that made me sick yesterday at the CIA. It was a bunch of total BS.
The Drive-By Media said that Obama got ‘rock star reception’ at the CIA, just like he got a rock star reception in Baghdad. Do you know how they set up that photo-op and all the screaming soldiers? They went around and they only allowed soldiers that had voted for Obama in there — and now at the CIA — do you think anybody other than the secretarial pool and people with hardly any clearance were able to get in there and see this thing? I guarantee you the whole thing was stacked as well. All of this is for show. It was designed to show that the CIA is totally, 100% up to speed with what Obama is doing, when that cannot be the case. People who have trained all their lives, devoted their lives to defending and protecting this country in some of the most dangerous places in the world have to feel betrayed, especially with the release of Obama’s memos.
We keep hearing from the left that going to Iraq created more terrorists, and doing this created more terrorists. Torture, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, all created more terrorists. How about the release of those memos? How about the release of Obama’s memos? He gave away all the techniques, advised everybody, ‘Here’s all they’re going to do, and here’s training on how to resist it.’ How many terrorists did that create? How many people are now eager to sign up with the Islamofascists after getting a load of the release of Obama’s terror and torture memos? Here is a montage, again, the Drive-By Media saying Obama had rock star treatment at the CIA. You know, Hugo Chavez does not even get press like this, and Hugo Chavez owns the media! The idea that the CIA universally loves Barack Obama, especially yesterday, is absurd.
CHIP REID: He was received like a rock star there. It was like a campaign event, complete with screaming fans.
ED HENRY: It was a rock star reception.
NORAH O’DONNELL: …greeted like a rock star.
TAMRON HALL: …treating him like a rock star.
DAVID SHUSTER: The president was greeted like a rock star this afternoon by employees of the CIA at agency headquarters.
RUSH: Just amazing! They all say the same thing, every damn description, doesn’t matter where you go, doesn’t matter what you watch, you hear the same treatment of an Obama event. ‘He got rock star treatment.’ By the way, the first wave of Pulitzers was announced yesterday. What have I always told you? You budding young journalists in journalism school out there, what have I always told you? If you really want to advance, if you really want to enhance your resume, if you’re working for a small town paper and you want to move up, what do you do? You destroy somebody. You delve into their private life and you destroy them. Not their public life. You delve into their private life. And so what the New York Times got five Pulitzers for the Eliot Spitzer story. If anybody should get a Pulitzer for that, it’s the hooker!
Anybody can reprint what the hooker said! But there are five Pulitzers for destroying Spitzer. And then there was somebody else. Oh, Kwame Kilpatrick. The Detroit paper got some Pulitzers for destroying Kwame Kilpatrick. Well, anybody can read text messages. But there you have it. Destroy somebody. Destroy somebody’s personal, private life, and you get a Pulitzer. In the meantime, the New York Times announced today that they lost $76 million in the first quarter. These people are practically losing a million dollars a day. CNN has no audience. They gotta be losing money, too. TimeWarner could probably use CNN as a loss leader, ’cause CNN is a boutique agency, a boutique division. CNN gives the TimeWarner liberal imprimatur, all the proper cocktail party invitations in New York, all of the attaboy, attaboy!
They may only have 600,000 viewers and they look at Fox’s five million and they’ll say, ‘Well, those are just cult followers. We have the real news audience. Yeah. We have Anderson Cooper. We were for Obama. We’re good people,’ and I have people asking me, ‘What can CNN do to change this? I mean they can’t be making any money.’ Yes, they can. Advertising agencies are polluted with young little feminists and liberals that are the media buyers, and they will funnel ad buys to CNN on behalf of clients when they don’t deserve the buys and they’ll probably get rate card rates. I’d be stunned to know that CNN is losing money. I think it’s all a nice little game the libs have cooked up. I understand this because we couldn’t… I don’t know. Just trust me. I know this to be the case.
And even if CNN… Let’s just say CNN recognized that they’ve got no viewers, and the viewers they have are becoming smaller and smaller, and they’re losing their audience. What changes would they make that would end up having them be any different? They are committed Obamaists; they are committed liberals. If they broomed the entire executive suite, they’re going to go out and hire the same kind of people that come in and run the place then. And they’ll put on, ‘Weeeeell, maybe we’ll change the cosmetics of this show. We’ll change a different set. Maybe get a different liberal to host the losing eight p.m., nine p.m. and ten p.m. hours. Just go get some new liberals in there!’
They’re not going to change anything substantively. The New York Times isn’t either. Both outfits, CNN and the New York Times are losing… Well, I don’t know about CNN. The New York Times losing money hand over fist. And I’ll guarantee you, the last thing they think is wrong is their content. The last thing they think is wrong is their product. They’re blaming it on the recession. ‘We can’t sell ads. Our ad sales are down 21%. It’s a recession.’ I’m not having any trouble. Have you seen the story about all these members of Congress, everybody gaining weight during the recession? The recession has caused people to quit their gyms. You know, a lot of congressmen are overweight. It’s a common joke about how fat congressmen and Senators are.
And so they’ve taken up, ‘Well, yeah, it’s a recession. A lot of people out there, not congressmen and senators, a lot of people have had to cancel gym membership and they’re not doing as much exercise. The recession, it’s causing a lot of people to gain weight, recession, and global warming, fatties, by the way, are causing more global warming.’ Let me tell you something. I have lost 35 pounds in 41 days in the middle of a recession. Everything they report is just stupid! Everything they report is BS. The recession causing people to gain weight? ‘Yes, Mr. Limbaugh, because nutritious foods, organic nutritious foods are in shorter supply and they’re much more expensive and so people are having to resort to eat junk food and they’re gaining weight as a result of it.’
Really? It’s somebody else’s fault, forcing all of you liberals against what you think you know to be good for you into these fatty foods? The recession’s doing this? ‘That’s right, Mr. Limbaugh! It’s these circumstances that were unintended brought in by the recession. That’s why people are gaining weight, and that’s why, that’s why we need to end the recession so that the people join the gyms again.’ The reporting that we get from the Drive-By Media today is just insufferably insipid sophistry. Plus, it’s bogus. So here’s Obama, a biiiig rock star at the CIA. I just don’t believe it. That was a pep rally, and it was a pep rally after the interrogation memos were released. It was a show, because Obama took some hits on the release of those interrogation memos, so what do you do?
You bop over to CIA and you show that the CIA loves you, and then you get your sycophants in the media to follow you over there and then report that you got rock star treatment. Do you know how many people worked Langley? Ten thousand people work at Langley. At any given time, at the CIA headquarters, there are fewer than a couple of hundred counterterrorism operatives. They’re in the field. The very people who feel betrayed are not there. Have you’ve ever read a Vince Flynn book, I’m talking about the Mitch Rapp types, they don’t have offices and hole up in the CIA. They’re holed up in caves and other places most Americans wouldn’t go, along with the Special Ops guys and the SEALs.
And they’re not there to give the president of the United States rock star treatment. Who is there? A bunch of secretaries, a bunch of paper pushers who have lower security clearance than the janitorial staff that cleans the director’s office. That’s who shows up. That’s who gets organized for the Obama pep rally. The men and women who work in the clandestine service, to my mind, they don’t know what in the hell to do. They’ve just been compromised. Every tool at their disposal has been taken away from them now. I would think their morale is at an all-time low. They have to live under constant fear that they’re going to be indicted. Not for just doing their job right now, but for doing what they were told was legal in years past.
You get the right Democrat and the right committee and they find the right CIA operative, they’ll bring him up there, for violating a law he thought was legal in the past. Vince Flynn wrote a book about this called Extreme Measures. I’ve read the story. I know how it turns out. When we get hit — not if — this entire administration, as well as all the political opportunists on Capitol Hill are going to be culpable. If you want to know what the result of the release of these memos is and this phony little dog-and-pony show, rock star pep rally at the CIA was about yesterday, go get Extreme Measures by Vince Flynn. And if you have it, read it again. Now, here’s Obama informing the CIA he ended the interrogation techniques that worked. He’s condescending to them, I think.
OBAMA: I have put an end to the interrogation techniques described in those OLC memos, and I want — I want to be very clear and very blunt. I’ve done so for a simple reason: because I believe that our nation is stronger and more secure when we deploy the full measure of both our power and the power of our values, including the rule of law. I know I can count on you to do exactly that.
RUSH: Why would anybody at the CIA listen to a former community organizer with no experience in executive management or intelligence? Why would anybody listen to this guy come over there and condescend to them? He has just helped Islamofascists recruit more terrorists, is what he has done. Under the guise of protecting American values? What American values is he talking about? The values we’re concerned about where the CIA is concerned is defending and protecting the country. He makes a joke here about being criticized on cable shows.
OBAMA: I understand that it’s hard, when you are asked to protect the American people against people who have no scruples and would willingly and gladly kill innocents. Al-Qaeda is not constrained by a Constitution. Many of our, uh, adversaries are not constrained by a belief in freedom of speech or representation in court or rule of law. I’m sure that sometimes it seems as if that means we’re operating with one hand tied behind our back or that those who would argue for a higher standard are naive. I understand that. You know, I — I watch the cable shows once in a while.
FOLLOWERS: (laughter)
RUSH: He understands what these people are going through? He’s talking to people not even in counterterrorism. He’s talking to people not even in the field. He understands? He watches cable TV, too? He understands what? He understands he’s made their job practically impossible, and then he went and said this.
OBAMA: So, yes, you’ve got a harder job, and so do I. And that’s okay. Because that’s why we can take such extraordinary pride in being Americans — and over the long term, that is why I believe we will defeat our enemies because we’re on the better side of history.
RUSH: There he goes again.
OBAMA: So don’t be discouraged by what’s happened the last few weeks. Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge, potentially, we’ve made some mistakes. That’s how we learn.
RUSH: So he goes over to the CIA once again as the morally superior man in America (forget president) and said this country’s made some mistakes, it was unjust and immoral before I got here but now we’re moral. And your job is going to harder, but this is what’s gonna make America greater. I swear, folks, it’s just the opposite. I want you to think about something. If we had a conservative president, conservative Republican, who, in the first week, had announced the cutting of the Department of Education and had announced that the federal budget would be cut in half, and then the next week had empowered the CIA for even tougher guidelines on torture? Can you imagine the Drive-By Media and how out of whack they would be? And yet dramatic changes in what has always defined this country’s greatness are taking place seemingly every day, every week — and we basically get pep rallies of cheering Obamaites, as though this is some great day for America, when we all know it isn’t.