RUSH: Matthew Continetti, who writes for — I think the Washington Examiner. I forget where. He has a piece in the Weekly Standard over the weekend that’s dated August 4th. I found it over the weekend. “Frozen in the Cold War — The Roots of ObamaÂ’s Weakness Abroad.” He makes a great case here that Obama is stuck in a Cold War mentality because he so despised it, he so hated it. And Continetti makes the point that much of this is anti-Reaganism with Obama, and that much we know, because, unlike many in the Drive-By Media during the 2007 and 2008 campaign period, we researched a number of things from Obama’s past. And he has many times and in many places written of his disgust with Reagan and his minions. He just hated Reagan, but he admired him.

He wants to emulate Reagan in one way. He makes it clear in his book that Reagan transformed America, had genuine influence, but he doesn’t like the way Reagan did it. So he wants to do the same thing, but roll it back. Now, in Obama’s view, coming out of Columbia University SDS, it’s the reason I love the piece, if I may say so, is because it’s been one of the themes of this program for the past couple of weeks, how Obama thinks America is the problem in the world. You see it with the latest manifestations of the Middle East problem today, with Israel and Gaza, Hamas, which we’ll get to in great detail here in a moment.

But it’s the United States that’s the problem. It’s the United States nuclear arsenal that’s been the problem. It’s the United States military that’s the problem. The United States is the destabilizing agent. The United States sitting here ordering everybody else around the world around has always been the problem. So Obama supported the nuclear freeze movement. He supported unilateral nuclear disarmament without any verification on the part of the Soviets, but Continetti’s point is he’s stuck in that mentality. It is what informs him today.

So you take the Obama that came out of Columbia University, whatever he did in the eighties, early nineties, whenever it was, and the formative events in his life were the nuclear freeze movement and Reagan expanding nuclear war tipped missiles in Europe which Obama hated, the United States is still the problem. The United States imperialism is still the problem. The United States thinking that it is the solution to all the problems in the world is the problem. The United States thinking that it has the moral authority to solve problems around the is the problem.

In Obama’s view, we’ve never had that moral authority. We have never had the right to tell other nations what to do. And so he is in the process of implementing his own anti-Reagan foreign policy. And you see it everywhere. He’s getting us out of the world. Whatever the Russians want to do, fine. He tells Dmitry Medvedev before his reelection bid in 2012 (imitating Obama), “Just tell Vlad, cool, chill out. I’ll have much more flexibility after the election.” He was talking about reducing our nuclear stockpile.

Continetti writes, “The further you go into ObamaÂ’s history of the Cold War, the more liberal shibboleths you encounter. It occurs to you that Obama is not studying anticommunism. He is engaging in anti-anticommunism.” Meaning that Obama opposed the people in this country who opposed the Soviet Union, and there were lots of ’em, folks. I’ll never forget that era, the seventies and the eighties, particularly the eighties.

It was a dividing line in this country. The Democrat Party, or the radical wing of the Democrat Party at that time — now the whole party’s radical — but the radical wing, there were a lot of Soviet sympathizers in academia, in elective office, in the media. They were everywhere and they believed that the Soviet Union had the answer. They just hadn’t gotten there yet, but it was the answer, ’cause it was equality and it was fairness and it was sameness and all that. And they wanted to sit back and let the Soviet leaders have enough time to implement what they believed in. This was being taught in the schools.

It was never a majority belief, but it was large. And there were those people who opposed the anti-communists, the William F. Buckleys, the Ronald Reagans, the vast majority of the conservative movement was — I mean, anti-Soviet Union communism was a huge, huge deal, and if you weren’t alive then you probably — I don’t know if it’s been conveyed to you and if your history studies have taught you just how big and important thing it was, as an identifier if nothing else, for what the United States believed in. It was tense. It was extremely partisan, and it was very frustrating for those of us who were very much opposed and/or afraid of Soviet sponsored communism, because they were intent on spreading it.

It’s what Nicaragua was all about, Grenada. I mean, they were trying to expand as many places as they could. Cuba, you name it. And there was a faction in this country that thought it was not a problem, thought the problem was the Buckleys of the world, the anti-communists. And that’s who Obama was. He was an anti-anticommunist.

“The main subject of his criticism isnÂ’t the Communists, itÂ’s the hardliners who fought them.” Those are the people that were wrong. Those were the people who posed the problem, in Obama’s view, and it still is the case. There’s several really good pull quotes in this piece. For example, “You see this single-minded fixation on America throughout dovish literature. According to the doves, America is always active on the international stage, never reactive.” Meaning, according to the doves, we always assert ourselves, trying to impose ourselves. We are the aggressors, the destablizers. In the dove community, we never are sitting around minding our own business and reacting to things that we see as threats. We are causing the threats, in their view. Imposing freedom. America is always the cause of trouble, to these people.

Obama’s just one of ’em. There were many, but the point is, according to Continetti, he has not let any of this go. It’s like — take whatever formative event — in other words, you know, a great way to characterize this, Obama’s stuck in the past while everybody thinks he’s a child of the future and holds the answer for the future and he’s all kinds of new and we’ve never seen it, he’s stuck in the past. He’s stuck in a Cold War the mentality because he feels at home there because it’s where he came of age, it’s where his greatest intellectual pursuits were, and it’s where he’s most comfortable, blaming America.

“You see this single-minded fixation on America throughout dovish literature. According to the doves, America is always active on the international stage, never reactive.” We’re always active. We’re causing the problem. America is always the cause of trouble. We are never the first responder to aggression and chaos. We’re causing it, in their view.

“The threat the Soviet Union posed to international order and individual liberty is hardly ever mentioned,” and they never did, folks. The Soviet Union was always innocent. The Soviet Union was never guilty of anything. We were guilty. We were forcing them to be who they were. We were causing this with our aggressive tendencies and our desires to stray outside our borders and tell everybody else how to live. This is the way Obama saw the world and still does, that’s the key. And the reason I love this piece is because it is right up my alley of the themes that we have been talking about vis-a-vis not just Israel and Hamas, but Libya and Syria and Ukraine, it’s everywhere. The world, as Madam Albright said, the world is a mess. She doesn’t know why, but somehow we are to blame for it. That’s why she’s talking about.

Obama believes the same thing. The world would not be a mess if we got out of it. If we just hung in here and if we just took care of the inequalities and the racism and the bigotry and all the isms that are plaguing us domestically, if we just did that, then the world would be fine. But, no, no, no, we gotta go out and tell everybody else how to live, in his view.

“The threat the Soviet Union posed to international order and individual liberty is hardly ever mentioned,” just like, if I may extrapolate, the threat posed by Al-Qaeda is never mentioned. Instead, we’re told that Al-Qaeda is Al-Qaeda because of our policy with Israel. Al-Qaeda is Al-Qaeda because of poverty. Al-Qaeda is Al-Qaeda because they’re mad at us because of things that we’ve done. They are never, militant Islam never called on it, by these people. Just like the Soviet Union was never called on who they were.

“Obama notes ReaganÂ’s ‘invasion of tiny, hapless Grenada.’ But he ignores the causes of American intervention.” This is in one of his writings that Matthew Continetti found as an example of Obama and his current mindset. He’s still got Grenada on the brain. He’s still ticked off about that which happened in 19, what, 82, ’83, somewhere in the eighties. Tiny little country, but the Soviets were attempting to establish a beachhead, our hemisphere. We stopped it. The left in this country hated Reagan for that. They never threatened us, what are we doing? Obama holds that view. But he ignored why we intervened.

It was “a bloody Marxist coup, engineered by the USSR and Cuba, on a Caribbean island.” It was right here in our back door. That’s why it was shut down. “He doesnÂ’t say that the rise of the PeopleÂ’s Revolutionary Army did not justify war. He doesnÂ’t note that the brief US intervention led to the restoration of constitutional government. He just dodges the argument altogether,” and just beats up America for doing it. That’s the beginning and end. The “why” never mentioned; the success of the operation never mentioned; just we were wrong for doing it.

By the same token, “Something similar happens in his presidential speeches. Obama often refers to the fall of the Berlin Wall. What he does not talk about is the building of the wall: who built it, why, and at what cost in lives and misery,” that building the wall and enforcing it caused. It’s just that the Berlin Wall came down and America did something great. But he never talks about who built it and why. “ItÂ’s as though the wall appeared out of thin air. And only the indomitable human will to freedom — not a 50-year-long, costly global struggle led by the United States — brought it down.”

We had nothing to do with it. The native people dominating that era finally wanting to be free brought down the wall. Reagan had nothing to do with it except when it’s time to blame Reagan for something. Continetti’s point is this is who Obama was and this is who Obama is, and now Obama is finally ready to enforce our border but not on people coming in, on US corporations going out.

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RUSH: In 1983 Barack Obama is at Columbia. In March of 1983 he published an article, student magazine. The article is entitled, “Breaking the War Mentality.” The article makes plain Obama’s revulsion at what he saw as Cold War militarism and his positive feelings about the nuclear freeze movement. He hated the Cold War and blamed the United States for it. We were the destabilizing agent because of our nuclear arsenal. Now, this article called “Breaking the War Mentality” was in a student magazine. The magazine was called Sundial, this article didn’t appear.
Nobody knew about it ’til 2009.

Who keeps copies of a student newspaper from 1983 around? So nobody knew about this during the campaign of 2007, 2008, and nobody had it to make connections between it and the way Obama was campaigning in 2008, and it eventually surfaced, was discovered, quote, unquote, in 2009, after Obama was safely elected.

In it he writes, “Most students at Columbia do not have first hand knowledge of war. … The more sensitive among us struggle to extrapolate experiences of war from our everyday experience.” It’s impossible to know the true costs of war from afar, “bringing such experience down into our hearts, and taking continual, tangible steps to prevent war, becomes a difficult task.” But he says it isn’t impossible. And he went with far-left student groups such as Arms Race Alternatives (ARA) and Students Against Militarism (SAM). He was a sixties left-wing radical regretting that it was the eighties. Matthew Continetti’s piece in the August 4 issue of the Weekly Standard makes the point that’s still who Obama is. He has not moved forward. He’s stuck 40 years ago or 30.

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RUSH: Now, I want to talk a little history and connect it to the present vis-a-vis Obama and his nuclear freeze, Cold War, America-was-responsible-for-it-all mentality.

The Soviet Union was putting nuclear-tipped warheads all over the Soviet bloc, threatening their neighbors. That was never opposed by the nuclear freeze movement. It was never opposed by the American left. It was when we countered, when Reagan wanted to put nuclear missiles in Europe that the nuclear freeze movement went batty and once again blamed us.

The Soviet Union was incapable of aggression — the Soviet Union, the communists, were incapable of doing anything wrong — because they were only reacting to us and our aggression, in their minds. In the minds of people like Obama and the left then and today, we were not reactive. We didn’t get up and look at things we believed in — or friends of ours being attacked or allied nations — and defend them.

That isn’t what we did. We got up and decided who we were gonna aggress against that day, who we were gonna take out, who we were gonna hassle. They look at the United States as the problem and the destabilizing agent. Again Matthew Continetti’s point is that’s still who Obama is, and you can see it in every foreign policy story or issue that’s there today. Syria? Iran? It’s not our business.

We, in fact, may be responsible for all of this. So it’s our job to get out. We have nothing to do with it. It’s their problem, not ours. The best thing that can happen in Obama’s mind is for us to get out of all these things, and then the world will not be so destabilized. This is what people believed in the seventies and eighties, and the left of the day still believes it today. The point is, Obama’s stuck in the past.

He’s not some forward thinker, some hip, cool dude who’s ways ahead of us. Obama’s stuck in the past, in the mud way behind us. But how does it impact today? Well, the Soviet Union introduced a surface-to-air missile in Europe in 1980 called the “Buck,” or “Bewk.” I have not heard it pronounced. It’s the B-u-k. You’ve heard of it recently. I don’t know how it’s pronounced.

But the B-u-k, the Buk surface-to-air missile in Europe was first deployed by the Soviet Union in 1980. Ronald Reagan wanted to counter them, by equalizing the threat in order to diminish it. So we wanted to deploy a similar type of nuclear-tipped missiles — these would have been tactical nukes — at various strategic points in Western Europe. At the time, Obama was alive.

He was at Columbia and he was livid. He was writing how he protested. Nobody cared then, nobody knew who Obama was, but he was still writing that in the student newsletter. However, his secretary of state today, John Kerry, who was yet to… No, he had served in Vietnam then! John Kerry was part of this Blame-America-First Crowd.

John Kerry and Teddy Kennedy were leading the charge, protesting the Reagan deployment of nuclear-tipped missiles in Western Union in order to counter the Soviet threat and eliminate it by equalizing it. John Kerry, Teddy Kennedy, Barack Obama never protested the Soviet surface-to-air missiles, the mobile ones. They could move ’em around. They were not locked in position.

These were mobile; they could drive them around on, you know, in little U-Haul type things and launch ’em from wherever. That was never protested. Whatever the Soviet Union did was never protested. Just like what Hamas does is not protested, but Israel is. Hamas could do anything and it ends up being Israel’s fault. That’s the way it was then; that’s the way it is today, because that’s who Obama is.

Well, this missile, the Soviet Buk surface-to-air missile is exactly what brought down the Malaysian airliner. Same type of missile. They introduced that missile in Europe in 1980. It was one of the systems Reagan wanted to counter, but John Kerry, Obama, the Democrats protested Reagan’s response. So now we’ve got the Soviet Union reconstituting itself.

That’s exactly what Vladimir Putin wants to do, and everybody knows it. (Some will admit it and some won’t.) Where’s Obama on this? “It doesn’t matter. We don’t have any business telling them what they should or should not do! We have no business. If we’d get out of there, who knows? It’d probably be peace would break out. It’d be more peaceful.”

This is the way they thought then, and the point is that this is the way Obama thinks today. Once you understand the history of the freeze movement — and that’s really kind of too narrow. It was just the anti-American Cold War, the anti-anti-communists, and Obama was one. These were the people who were opposed to those trying to stop the Soviet Union. It was always America that was the problem; the Soviet Union never was.

Today, it’s always Israel that’s the problem. It just happens to be the US ally, right? It’s not Hamas. Those tunnels that have been discovered? “Well, hell, what would you do if you had this big, huge, unfair dragon next door launching missiles and killing your kids? What would you do?” This is the way they think. Hamas is the never-ending minority. They’re the constant victim of an evil, mean, unfairly big Israel.

As such, they really can’t commit any crimes ’cause they’re too tiny. It’s like “minorities can’t be racists ’cause they don’t have the power to do anything with it.” It’s a convoluted, perverted kind of thinking that it takes gullible low-information people to fall for. Do you know that Barack Obama refused to attend the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall back in November 2009?

Does anybody remember that? He refused to go. Now, they said at the time that Obama didn’t go because he didn’t want to anger Putin, and he doesn’t want to anger Putin now. He really believes… Folks, this sounds sophist, but I’m telling you: I know these people like every square inch of my glorious naked body, not just back of my hand.

I know them, and they believe, just like with Al-Qaeda: “If we just show them we don’t intend them any harm, they’ll stop threatening us.” They really believe that. That’s one of the things guiding Obama’s relationship Putin. But there are worse aspects, not just that one. The worse aspects are that Putin exists because we do. The Soviet Union was what it was because of us.

Somebody had to counter us, ’cause we were always the aggressor in the view of the anti-anti-communists. By the way, I should point out that this is one of the things that bothers me about the modern libertarian movement. They think the same thing, many of them do. Ron Paul, for example, also believes that much of the world’s unrest is caused by us intervening where we have no business.

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RUSH: By the way, grab sound bite 24. Obama today in Washington, the inaugural summit of the Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders. During the Q&A of the inaugural summit of the Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders, someone in the audience said, “If somehow Africa unified into a United States of Africa, when you spoke with their new leader, what would be the first two things you’d want to discuss?” So if there became a US of Africa and Obama had a chance to talk to the president of this hypothetical United States of Africa, the question is, audience member wants to know, what would you tell this new president? Get this.

OBAMA: The thing that I would emphasize first and foremost is the issue of governance. Now, sometimes this is an issue that raises some sensitivities, because I think people feel like, who’s the United States to tell us how to govern. We have different systems. We have different traditions. What may work for the United States may not work for us. Oh, and, by the way, the United States, we don’t see that Congress is always, you know, cooperating so well and your system is not perfect. I understand all that. So let’s acknowledge all that.

RUSH: Okay. So he’s telling the inaugural summit of Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders that, “You know, a lot of people, and they’re right, by the way, a lot of people think, who’s the US to tell us how to govern? Hell, they can’t even get along with their own Congress.” He’s trying to tell these people that the first thing you should do is not listen to the United States. This is exactly who he is. But the thing is, we don’t tell people how to govern. We stand for the freedom and liberty and liberation of the oppressed all over the world. If we impose anything, which we don’t, it’s freedom. They don’t get it.

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RUSH: I want to play this sound bite for you again from Obama. He was at the inaugural summit for the Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders. For those of you in Rio Linda, it means it was the first one of these things ever. So we have a bunch of young African leaders in Washington learning how to lead from “Barack Hussein Obama! Mmm! Mmm! Mmm!”

And after his speech one of the audience members had a question. “Mr. President, if somehow Africa unified into a United States of Africa, when you spoke with the new leader, what would be the first two things you would want to discuss with the new president of the United States of Africa?”

OBAMA: The thing that I would emphasize first and foremost is the issue of governance. Now, sometimes this is an issue that raises some sensitivities, because I think people feel like, who’s the United States to tell us how to govern.

RUSH: See?

OBAMA: We have different systems. We have different traditions.

RUSH: See?

OBAMA: What may work for the United States may not work for us.

RUSH: See?

OBAMA: Oh, and, by the way, the United States, we don’t see that Congress is always, you know, cooperating so well and your system is not perfect.

RUSH: See?

OBAMA: I understand all that. So let’s acknowledge all that.

RUSH: (imitating Obama) “So, hey, the first thing I’d tell ’em is, don’t emulate us. Our system isn’t perfect. Look, I can’t get these idiots in Congress to go along and cooperate with me, and so –” you ever think that’s because you’re a lousy leader? Isn’t that what presidents are supposed to do, is lead? Maybe you’re not a good leader. Maybe you’re lousy at it. Maybe that’s why they don’t cooperate with you. But of course no, it’s their fault, ’cause they’re just not cooperative. They won’t bend over, grab the ankles, do whatever Obama wants.

So don’t emulate us, United States of Africa. Besides, who’s the United States to tell people how to govern? Right. There’s nothing special about the United States. Only the freest, wealthiest, richest, greatest country ever. Nothing great about us. A country that’s done more for the world, done more good for the world, been there for the world, nothing special about us. Don’t listen to the US tell you how to do things. Come up with your own system.

It’s an embarrassment, folks. But that’s who our president is, and he’s a direct descendant of the past. The United States is the problem in the world.

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RUSH: In Clifton, Virginia, this is Lawrence. Great to have you on the program. Hello.

CALLER: Hello, Rush. How are you?

RUSH: Very well, sir.

CALLER: Long, longtime listener, first-time caller.

RUSH: Thank you very much. I appreciate that, sir.

CALLER: I wanted to give you a little bit of perspective about the Berlin Wall and the Cold War that happened in and around that city, because I have some firsthand experience. I, in fact, was the commander at Checkpoint Charlie in 1986 to 1989, and also a liaison officer to the Soviet Union commander in East Berlin during that same period. So I was also standing in close proximity to President Reagan when he made his speech and requested that Mr. Gorbachev tear down the wall in 1987. So if there ever was a place in the Cold War where good and evil faced off, it was right there in Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie and in front of the Brandenburg Gate. So a little perspective about why the wall went up. You had asked the question earlier in the show —

RUSH: No, no, no. Wait, wait. No, we know why the wall went up. My point was Obamacare doesn’t care why it went up. When Obama rips Reagan, when Obama rips the American Cold War and he then praises the wall coming down, he never talks about why it was there. He never blames the Soviet Union, never blamed East Germany, never blamed Erich Honecker. He never goes there. They never did anything wrong. It was always the US was wrong.

CALLER: Correct. And you know who the leader of the KGB was right across the wall there in that period in the late eighties? That was Mr. Vladimir Putin.

RUSH: Right, and no one ever leaves the KGB.

CALLER: Correct.

RUSH: Even when they disband the KGB, which they supposedly did, you don’t leave it.

CALLER: Yeah. Well, that may have had something to do with why Mr. Obama didn’t attend the 20-year anniversary of the wall coming down.

RUSH: Which he didn’t. He did not. They claimed that the reason Obama didn’t go to the 20th anniversary of the wall coming down is he didn’t want to anger Putin. The real reason he didn’t go was because it was Reagan’s deal, and he’s not gonna take part in anything that lifts up Reagan.

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RUSH: This is Lisa in New Orleans. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hey. How’s it going, Rush?

RUSH: It’s great. How are you?

CALLER: I’m great. I was tweaked up by your topic while I was running around the house today, and I wanted to let you know, I have always told my kids through the whole Obama administration, that he’s basically intellectually lazy. He has been since day one. And over and over again he’s shown it, whether it was how he ran on the economy. Even when it blew up, he still charged ahead with all these policies that never really sparked the economy, and he knew this. He knew it would happen. He’s also always treated foreign policy like a big inconvenience. He never wants to address it because it gets in the way of everything else he’s had on his mind for the last 20 years.

RUSH: Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.

CALLER: And that’s the one thing I’ve always told my kids, you know, think for yourself, look at what he’s doing —

RUSH: How old are your kids?

CALLER: — and you can figure this guy out just like you always say, just like the back of your hand —

RUSH: How old are your kids?

CALLER: Thirteen and 16. They’re both in high school.

RUSH: All right. Are your efforts to convince them successful?

CALLER: Absolutely. You know, my daughter’s gone toe-to-toe in some of her classrooms, and the teachers have let her. She’s in a very think-for-yourself kind of place, and we use a lot of private school systems here in New Orleans, and hers is no exception. She’s taken ’em on nose-to-nose in class to think for themselves on things like oil production and supply and demand and things like that that she’s always heard in the house. And she has, you know, a working teenage knowledge of those things. And her teachers have let her fly on those thoughts because it’s basically saying, you know, you can be led by your nose or you can stop and think.

RUSH: She’s probably saying things her teachers haven’t even heard, and so they’re probably mesmerized by it. May in fact be, if she’s talking about free markets and thing like that, may well be the first time some of her teachers have heard this stuff. And if your daughter is articulate and compelling, it could be why the teachers shut up. But I want to take a little bit of issue with you on this intellectual laziness. I know what you mean by it, and I’m not predisposed to disagree.

I think what we might call intellectual laziness is actually arrogance. Now, you’re right, he looks at a whole lot of things as irritating interruptions and distractions for what he really is interested in and cares about, which is the domestic transformation of the United States away from a free market, capitalist-based society to a command-and-control government making decisions for everybody in society, socialism, whatever you want to call it, command-and-control centralized economy.

However, don’t discount the way I opened the program today. He is an active, intellectually active Cold War mentality kind of guy. He hasn’t let it go. It is a very active intellectual engagement that he believes the US is the problem in the world. And he’s not alone. John Kerry is this way. Hillary Clinton is this way. Many of the Democrats that were in school in the eighties, Madeleine Albright, they carry around this same belief system that the Cold War existed because of the United States, refusing to let people run their own lives and run their own governments and run their own affairs. We had no business.

He is obsessed now with finally establishing a United States that behaves in a world with that belief system, i.e., if Putin wants Ukraine, fine, it’s none of our business. Who are we to say he shouldn’t take it? We took Alaska. We took Mexico way back then. If you want to go back to the Louisiana Purchase, we took New Orleans. So who are we to say that Putin shouldn’t take Ukraine or Crimea? Who are we to say that Putin shouldn’t have Cuba if he wants? None of our business. And that the United States trying to stop all these other places from having what they want has caused all of the problems in the world.

Israel has a state. Who says the Hamas can’t? Who says that the Muslim Brotherhood can’t? What business is it of ours? That’s not intellectually lazy. I know what you mean by it, and I get your point, but this is not happening because he doesn’t care.