RUSH: Chuck in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, as we head back to the phones. Thank you for calling. Great to have you the on program. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you for taking my call, Rush. My wife and I have enjoyed you for the last 20-plus years.
RUSH: Thank you very much. I really appreciate that, sir. Thank you.
CALLER: I had a comment and then a question. Something you said yesterday about Obama maybe wanting to get rid of the NSA so he could put the Republicans into a predicament. I don’t think that’s gonna happen. If he suggests it, they should go along with it, because how else is he going to listen to Europe and spy on them and spy on us? You can’t do it through the FBI because, my question is, didn’t he step on the FBI back several years ago and kind of demean them?
RUSH: What are you talking about? This could be important. What are you talking about that I may have forgotten? What did he do to the FBI?
CALLER: I can’t remember what it was, but I thought at some point he kind of downgraded the FBI for something that had taken place, and I can’t remember. I thought maybe you could remember that.
RUSH: Well, I’ll get the highly overrated research team here on the staff looking into that. Nothing pops into my mind about Obama downgrading or ripping into the FBI or deemphasizing them. Now, you could be right. If there’s something out there, we’ll find it. I want to go back to your original point. I don’t think Obama wants to get rid of the NSA. I think he wants to end up having the Republicans blamed for stopping it. He doesn’t want to get rid of the collection of metadata. He doesn’t want to curtail this at all. My God, the guy is a huge statist!
CALLER: That’s why they should call his bluff. If he proposes that, they should just say, “Yeah, we’re going along with that,” because it isn’t gonna happen.
RUSH: Well, they have in a way. I have a vague memory of something that I saw yesterday, a story that the Republicans had their own version of a plan to actually do this. See, the working theory is that Obama’s young voters, this is the only thing that bugs them — this and Obamacare. But this, the spying on them, that bothers them more than anything about this president.
His young voters, like the Zuckerbergs and the Millennials, they thought Obama would never do things like that to them. This guy’s a new kind of president! He wasn’t gonna be spying, wasn’t gonna be doing that kind of stuff. Now he’s doing it more than any president ever has, and they’re fit to be tied. So Obama senses that. He needs these people on his side.
He needs them thinking he’s cool and hip. He needs ’em voting for Democrats. So he comes out and announces he’s gonna just totally eliminate this program, and they go, “Yay, baby! All right! That’s what we’re talking about.” And his buddies in the Senate go along with it, and then the Republicans in the House — the adults — put the brakes on it and say, “Sorry. We are not gonna weaken our national security by doing this.”
So Obama then gets to run around, “Hey, I’m trying to protect your privacy. I am trying to stop the spying on you, but those Republicans, they want to keep spying on you, I guess.” That’s what he set up. I don’t know that. That’s just the modus operandi. That’s how Obama does things. It’s how the Democrat Party does things, is try to blame it all on the Republicans. It’s rooted in the belief that the Republicans will stand on principle, now and then, such as an instance like this of protecting the country, national security and all that.
It would be fascinating if they did kind of call his bluff and go along about it, ’cause there would be hell to pay. His national security team would not put up with this. I’ll tell you something. Chuck here is right. The last thing Obama’s gonna do is end this program. He doesn’t want it stopped. He just wants the Republicans blamed for keeping it around. So Chuck, I’m glad you called. I really appreciate it. Thanks for your nice compliments as well. (Interruption) What? Yes. When Obama ran the first time, he was hostile to Bush about spying. Right. Of course it was. Obama hostile? Snerdley, you mean to tell me when Obama was running against Bush and ripping Bush and all that for all these warrantless wiretaps, just totally made up. It was totally pandering to people.
Look at what’s happened. Is Gitmo closed or is it open? Have renditions stopped or not? They haven’t. Are we still spying on people? Are we still collecting all this phone — yes, we are. At record levels. It hasn’t been cut back any. He just said that. But it’s like the Limbaugh Theorem, Mr. Snerdley. It’s always somebody else that’s preventing him from accomplishing what he promises to do. He’s gonna create jobs, but, damn it, these Republicans won’t raise the minimum wage, damn Koch brothers. He wants to get people back to work, but small-business people are so greedy that they won’t pay anybody. (interruption) Well, next question is, “So it’s not like they’re campaigning and all that, then they get there and find out how different it really is and how much power they have.”
Given that Obama is an Alinskyite, I think he’s had designs on what he was gonna do long before he got there and long before he found whatever he discovered there. And I think, to him, being president means unlimited power. I don’t think it’s something he discovered that he had access to. I think that’s one of the reasons he ran. I don’t think he discovered anything he didn’t know, except the economy. He did find out that Bush didn’t tell him the truth about how bad the economy was. Remember that? (impersonating Obama) “They didn’t tell us how bad it was, and that’s why my stimulus plan hasn’t really worked yet ’cause it turns out it wasn’t enough, ’cause they didn’t tell me. They kept it secret how bad it really was.” You’ve heard that three or four times, too.