RUSH: Here’s Jeff in Minneapolis. It’s great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Stay-at-home-of-seven dittos to you. Question for you: Which is the greater threat do you think, liberalism or terrorism?

RUSH: Well, that’s an interesting question.

CALLER: Thank you.

RUSH: “What is the greater threat, liberalism or terrorism?”

CALLER: Yep.

RUSH: See, both of them — both liberals and terrorists — have a lot in common. The one thing that they hate the most is freedom. The one thing that orients them toward their ideology is their opposition to freedom. You look at this suburban business. You look at the Obama and the suburbs. What really bugs him about it, as well as the financial aspect of it, is the freedom that people have to go back and forth that the wealth that they have earned provides them. A leftist and a terrorist — a leftist and a totalitarian — are one and the same. Anything that stands in the way of my freedom stands in the way of the American way of life. So I think when you ask me, you’re obviously bouncing off what I have said about the liberals looking at us as the greatest threat to their way of life.

CALLER: Correct.

RUSH: It’s not inconsistent. We stand for freedom. That’s their biggest bugaboo. Freedom is what makes people different. Freedom and liberty is what allows different outcomes from person to person to person. It’s freedom that allows exceptionalism, freedom that permits greatness, freedom that results in differences. Well, if you look at Sharia law in Islam, they want everybody to live identically: Same rules, same way, same outcomes in life.

So does the American liberal. I don’t know what you’re trying to do with your question, but I look at conservatives as defending the country as founded. It’s the greatest ever, founded on liberty, and I don’t care where there is an enemy to that. It’s gonna be opposed and defeated. So the left… I don’t hear, for example, anything I say repeated by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I don’t hear anything I say repeated by Fidel Castro.

I don’t hear anything I say repeated by Western European socialists or Vladimir Putin. But I hear a lot of similarities when I listen to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad criticize this country. It could be Harry Reid, could be Barack Obama. I don’t understand how in the world Americans could have, as their archenemies, people who believe in freedom, liberty — us, conservatives! But it is the greatest threat. There cannot be freedom, as founded in this country, and liberalism.

They cannot coincide.

Liberals are all about domination, control, power. Look at the health care plan! You’re not gonna have any choices. You’re not gonna have any liberty in it once they finish implementing the whole thing. Look at Obama if he gets his way on this suburban stuff. If he gets his way on green energy. The standard fossil fuel energy that permits freedom and liberty to drive and travel and whatever? It’s gonna be severely limited because the cost of that stuff is gonna skyrocket, and there will not be plentiful green energy.

There isn’t any!

So I don’t care who they are, be they American Democrats or jihadists or militant Islamists. Wherever there are leftists, we face an enemy. I don’t care what their citizenship is, pure and simple. If you believe in America as founded… (interruption) Well, if they don’t like it, you know what they should do? They should go read a book written by my buddy Andy McCarthy. It’s a book that documents, chronicles the peaceful and similar coexistence between militant Islamists and American liberals.

The commonalities, the things they have in common, the things that they agree and are similar. A leftist is a leftist wherever you find them. Totalitarianism, liberalism, it’s all a derivative of the same ideology. I was thinking about this, actually, in this context. I was thinking back to the 1980s before the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union represented, as Reagan called it, “the evil empire.”

In this country, the Democrat Party did not want to hear one word of criticism of the Soviet Union. If you were anti-communist, they made fun of you. They mocked you. “Ah, communists are nothing to be afraid of. Communists don’t exist anymore!” The Soviet Union was their dream. I mean, they loved Mikhail Gorbachev and hated Ronald Reagan! This isn’t anything new. They hated Reagan!

But for Gorbachev, they were groupies. And before Gorbachev, Uri Andropov and before that Brezhnev. Didn’t matter. And then before that, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. Look how they salivate over Castro and Hugo Chavez. Is Castro a terrorist? Does he have political prisoners? Does he put people in jail, shoot ’em on sight, whatever? Of course! Now, the Democrat Party here doesn’t do that. They don’t shoot people on sight and there are not political prisons, but the same attitude — the same fear of freedom — exists.

Liberty is something they’ve gotta tamp down.

They can’t co-exist with free people. It can’t happen.

There can’t be liberalism in that way.

There has to be an attempt to meld and force everybody into the same mold.

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RUSH: I have to say, though, folks, terrorism is the greatest threat, because we can still defeat liberals without violence. So terrorism still, of course, represents a greater threat than the Democrat Party. We can handle them without violence. So far.

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RUSH: Of course I recognized it as a trick question. Of course I recognized it as a trick! A guy called me and wanted to know, “Well, do you look at liberals as a greater threat to the American way of life than terrorists?” It was a trick, right? He was trying to trick the host. Look, that’s why I launched into an unassailable explanation of freedom, folks. It’s so simple. You hear the Democrats talk about pro-choice. There’s no such thing! They don’t believe in choice.

It’s the exercise of choice that ticks them off.

But if you wanted me to take the question seriously, responding to the trick, I’ll do it very simply: Terrorism still remains the greater threat. Terrorism and liberalism, despite the similarities in ideology — similarities in ideology; not practice, but ideology — there’s no question that terrorism is the greater threat of the two. Because we could still defeat liberals without having to resort to violence.

We’re never gonna be able to beat the terrorists in a nonviolent way.

That just isn’t gonna happen. But in this vein, I just want to point out: Folks, look, our ambassador is dead, three other Americans are dead in Benghazi, and who does Obama blame? An American! A guy who filmed a video that nobody saw, including the attackers. And, by the way, the truth of this is now well known. Every day there’s more information about who knew what when regarding that attack in Benghazi.

Now it’s out that we had numerous warnings prior to the attack on our consulate and the death of our ambassador. We had numerous warnings, and for eight days Obama lied and sent his people out to lie, and the media propagandized the lie trying to blame this Coptic Christian and his Looney Tunes video. So given the opportunity to blame terrorists for something they did versus an American, what did Obama do?

For eight days, he tried to make everybody think — us in this country and around the world — that an American, using our First Amendment, was responsible for that. That is highly insulting and reprehensible, but it’s a sign of the times.