RUSH: Okay, now, what was it that Mrs. Clinton said? This is before everybody went away on the holiday break, on the Christmas break. What did Hillary say? I’m asking rhetorically, ’cause I know what she said, everybody knows what she said. You may have forgotten, but I haven’t.
She said we’ve gotta empathize with our enemies and we’ve got to endeavor to understand them. We have to endeavor to understand how what we do makes them feel. And we have to endeavor to understand and use empathy in dealing with them, and we can’t always just consider them flat-out enemies, that they have points of view that it would be worth our effort to try to understand. That’s what Mrs. Clinton said.
I wonder why nobody’s bringing that up today. I haven’t seen one reference to Mrs. Clinton’s prescription for dealing with these people. I haven’t seen one network mention it today, and I don’t think that we will.
Greetings, my friends. Great to have you here. Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. The telephone number, if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882. The e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.
Twelve are dead, 12 people. Have you seen the video of the Paris police officer begging for his life and being shot? Well, it’s a YouTube video. I was able to watch it once, and I went back to try watch it again, and it’s now unavailable. It’s considered to be private. It’s pretty brutal. We’re up now to 12 people dead. This is a Paris satire newspaper, a newspaper called Charlie Hebdo. That’s the English pronunciation. I’m not sure how it’s pronounced in Anglicized French.
But the details are 12 people dead. Actually, 11, at least 11. It’s up now to 12 when you count the police officer. Eleven people were killed when gunmen arrived with Kalashnikovs and a rocket launcher and opened fire in the offices of the satirical news weekly Charlie Hebdo in France. Across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower and just down the river from Notre Dame to the east where this thing was located. This was a full-fledged military-style attack.
This was not random neighborhood ne’er-do-wells. This is an important aspect of this, I think, that it was a full-fledged, planned and executed military style attack, complete, obviously, with training and rehearsals and weaponry and everything else. The French president, Francois Hollande, who immediately headed to the scene of the shooting, described it as a terrorist attack. Our president was informed of this at 8:40 a.m. This occurred around six o’clock our time, six a.m. Eastern time is the best my memory is telling me when this happened, but Obama was informed about it, the violence, it was called, in France, at 8:40. He had not had his daily briefing yet at 8:40.
Let’s go to the audio sound bites. This is on CNN’s New Day. White House press secretary Josh Earnest was all over TV today, not Obama. The press secretary was on TV sounding like the president today, and during a discussion about the terror shootings at the French satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, the fill-in cohost Alisyn Camerota — does anybody know why she left Fox? You know, she was over there at Fox. She was Fox & Friends, Saturday morning anchorette infobabe, some other stuff, and the next thing I knew she’s over there at CNN. You didn’t hear anything about that? Snerdley, your fingers are usually on the pulse of this kind of stuff. Well, anyway. Alisyn Camerota was talking to Josh Earnest, and she said, “Josh, what is the president saying at this hour?” This is 8:40. This is a couple of hours after the attack on the newspaper in Paris.
EARNEST: The president is aware of the tragic events that we’ve seen in Paris early in the morning US time. The president does have the presidential daily briefing on his schedule this morning as usual, so the president will be meeting with his national security team this morning. I’m confident this will be on the agenda. I can tell you that the United States condemns in the strongest terms this horrific act of violence that we’ve seen in France.
RUSH: Obama’s aware, at 8:40, a couple hours after the fact, hasn’t had the daily brief yet. No, no, no, no, no. Don’t misunderstand. I’m not taking the occasion here, folks, to make — well, maybe a little. But, for crying out loud, there’s no question this was a full-on terror attack for which immediate action should be taken in similar locales in this country. These are very rarely one-offs.
Anyway, I just found it pretty interesting that the press secretary was sounding more presidential today than Obama usually does, sounding more decisive, but he was afraid to call it terrorism. It was deadly attack. It was a horrific act of violence. And he’s pretty sure that Obama was gonna be talking about it at the daily brief, which had not yet happened. Probably still celebrating the election of Boehner as Speaker of the House over at the White House late last night. Maybe that’s why the late start today.
Anyway, next on CNN’s New Day, the cohost Chris Cuomo said to Josh Earnest, “You keep using the word ‘violence.’ This is an act of terrorism. That’s what the president of France called it. You’re referring to ISIS and other bad actors. You know you’re fighting a large group of people, somewhat similar concern. Do you see this as an act of terrorism? Is this something that has to be condemned on that level?”
EARNEST: This is an act of violence that we certainly do condemn, and if based on this investigation it turns out to be an act of terrorism, then we would condemn that in the strongest possible terms.
RUSH: What is there to doubt here? I think this illustrates one of the problems that the civilized world — not just the United States — I think the civilized world is really up against. The civilized world is cowering in fear and has been for a long time. And the extent to which the civilized world is cowering in fear extends even so far as to be afraid to call this what it is. There is no question, there is no question the civilized world is in a defensive posture.
When you have the likely Democrat 2016 presidential nominee saying about people like this, “Hey, we gotta be careful and we must empathize with them. We must try to reach out and understand their grievance.” We have created such a widespread grievance industry throughout this country and throughout the civilized world. It’s obvious it’s imprisoning people in Great Britain. It has everybody’s hands and feet in shackles in the civilized world.
We’re literally in fear. We’re afraid to call stuff what it is and it’s got us handcuffed. It literally has us afraid to deal with this head on. And this grievance politics has taken such a great hold, and I mean this from bottom my heart, this whole notion of grievance politics. There’s a grievance industry now. It has its roots in the civil rights movement, but by no means is it contained there. The grievance industry practically encompasses all of left-wing politics. Everybody is a victim, everybody has a grievance against this mythical majority, which is made up of mean-spirited, evil extremists who all happen to be Republicans.
Plus, if you add to that the years and years and years of teaching and informing and inculcating the idea that the United States is illegitimate, which clearly the left has done, when you spread the word that the United States has mistreated the world and that therefore we kind of are owed this kind of thing. That’s why we must try to understand. It’s what Mrs. Clinton means when she talks about needing empathy. We’re guilty! We have a role in this. People otherwise wouldn’t be mad. They have a legitimate reason to be mad at us, and we better get serious and find out what it is and understand it. That’s what she means.
And this grievance industry, which has at its root the United States has misbehaved since its founding, the United States has had a much bigger footprint all over the world than we ever deserve to have. We’ve run over the world trampling everybody and everything. We’ve stolen, we have appropriated, and that’s why we’re a superpower, and it’s illegitimate, and it’s unjustified.
So this stuff — plus our relationship with Israel — all of that has combined to create, at the highest levels of our leadership, this idea that there is some evidence that the United States is responsible for this to an extent. I don’t know to what extent, but that we certainly have some guilt about this. That’s what the whole grievance industry is about.
And clearly ISIS has a grievance with us. Clearly Al-Qaeda does. Clearly militant Islam does. And when your entire political identity as either the Democrat Party or the American left is rooted in the fact that the United States is the problem in the world and its allies, by the way, and not the solution the world, then you end up in a cowering-in-fear-in-the-corner position where you are defensive and even tolerant, in some cases, of the assaults that we experience. Don’t doubt me on this that there are people at the highest levels of power in this country, not just in Washington, but, hell, practically the entire Ivy League looks at the US this way, higher education, which I really believe is at the root of so many of the problems we have in our culture. I really do.
But it’s patently obvious that we’re afraid to call this what it is. We’re afraid to call these people who they are and what they are. We’re afraid to correctly identify them, even so far as being a little recalcitrant in even calling it terrorism, and waiting around for somebody else to do it first. And then, “Oh, yeah, yeah, they said it? Fine, we can say it then.” Hollande has called it terrorism, an act of terror. Fine, gives us the opening to do so as well.
We’re pulling out of Afghanistan and we’re announcing it with pride. We’re pulling out of Iraq, or already did, and we’re announcing it with pride. We’re closing Gitmo. Obama’s got a fire sale going on. Anybody noticed? Every day, more and more people are released there. Why? Because Gitmo was said to be a terrorism recruiting tool. Okay. So we’re gonna eliminate the recruiting tool of Gitmo. All right, we’re gonna close it down. We’re gonna release everybody and that’s gonna show these people, “Hey, it’s a new day. You don’t need to worry about the US. We understand you have a grievance against us and you may have a point.”
Just like the ChiComs — don’t doubt me on this, folks. There was an undersecretary of state, there was a meeting at the White House — I mentioned this before the Christmas break. All the details are kind of foggy to me now, but the point is that the ChiComs had done something that violated human rights or whatever, and somebody in our Regime stood up with a visiting ChiCom politburo member standing there and said he understood that it was really not fair of us to criticize the ChiComs because we have our own civil rights violations in this country. I forget what he was specifically referring to. It might have been immigration. It was something silly, but do not doubt me that there are people that think this.
Bill de Blasio, this guy has grown up hating cops. This guy has grown up believing cops are the problem. Twenty years ago nobody thought anybody like this would ever be elected to anything; he’d just be a street corner rabble-rouser. Twenty years later, here he is mayor, bringing to life all of this idiocy and this extremism. He really does have an animus against cops. He really does. Well, if you think the police are the problem in the US, it’s not a big stretch to think the US is the problem in the world.
And so we’re making all of these public shows. We’re recognizing Cuba, and we’re not making Cuba hold to any of the terms of the deals they made. We are openly embracing dictatorships all over the world. We’re closing Gitmo. We’re getting out of Afghanistan, and under what premise? Well, we’re gonna show these people that we’re not George Bush anymore. That’s right. We’re gonna show these people that we don’t hate ’em anymore. We’re gonna show these people it’s a new day and they’re not gonna hate us anymore and they’re gonna leave us alone. It’s a new day. It’s what Obama promised in 2008, and voila, such a deep and profound misunderstanding of evil.
And you know the best way to express that or explain that? In this country, it is the Tea Party that arouses real anger and thoughts of evil in the Democrat Party and the left. Not ISIS. Not Al-Qaeda, but the Tea Party. That’s who they think is evil. These guys, we gotta empathize. You ever heard Hillary say we need to empathize with the Tea Party? We need to empathize with Sarah Palin? We need to empathize with Ted Cruz? Nope. But we do need to empathize with these guys.
And let’s not forget this. I’m gonna play this. This was Barack Hussein O, our president, September 25th, 2012, at the UN, after he had spent all this time once again blaming a video nobody had ever seen for the Benghazi attack.
OBAMA: The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.
RUSH: That’s our president at the UN in 2012.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: The thing I was trying to remember: It was a assistant secretary of state, Michael Posner (it was in May of 2010) who told a delegate from China that the US had its own human rights violations and so we couldn’t really come down hard on the ChiComs because we had our own. And he was talking about Arizona’s immigration laws, as evidence of United States human rights violations. So don’t doubt me on this.
Now, one other thing. I need to actually parse my own self.
Now, I have spent time today referring to the grievance industry and the aspect of grievance. That is, it seems like everybody and their uncle has a grievance against the US and that all of these grievances are considered justifiable. They are considered valid. But when talking about the attack on the newspaper in France, this really isn’t about grievance when you get right down to it, because we know who did this.
This is something that we still haven’t come to grips with. This is my precise point about western civilization now living in a totally defensive posture rooted in fear. It really isn’t about grievance. It really isn’t about that. These people are not doing what they’re doing because they have a grievance against us, other than the fact that we exist. This is about ideology. This is about the ideology of militant Islam. It’s not so much that this group or ISIS or Al-Qaeda or name your subsidiary has specific grievances against us.
It is that their ideology opposes our entire existence, and the ideology is called their religion. But it’s an ideology to these people, and it tells them to make war on and conquer non-Muslims. But, boy, don’t dare say it! “Oh, no! You don’t say that. Oh, no, don’t say that! That’ll really make ’em mad!” So we don’t. We cower in fear, and we don’t call it terrorism and we blame ourselves, or try to.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here is Mrs. Clinton. This was back on December 3rd in Washington, Georgetown University, during a foreign policy conference. Here is Hillary Rodham Clinton, the presumed Democrat presidential nominee in 2016, which makes her the presumed president-elect in 2016.
HILLARY: This is what we call smart power, using every possible tool and partner to advance peace and security. Leaving no one on the sidelines. Showing respect even for one’s enemies. Trying to understand and insofar as psychologically possible, empathize with their perspective and point of view, helping to define the problems, determine the solutions. That is what we believe in the twenty-first century will change, change the prospects for peace.
RUSH: There you have it. Presumptive Democrat nominee, 2016, Hillary Clinton on the same day 12 people murdered in a full-on military-style attack from Al-Qaeda or Muslim ISIS extremists, militant Islamists. That’s right. We need to not leave anybody on the sidelines. We need to do smart power. Use every tool. Show respect even for one’s enemies, trying to understand, and insofar as psychologically possible, trying to determine via empathizing with their perspective and point of view, solutions.
It’s breathtaking the naivete and the danger this kind of thinking puts all of us in. This is incompetence. This is head-in-the-sand ignorance and incompetence on proud display. This was considered brilliant. This was considered really, really forward thinking intellectualism. And it’s exactly the kind of crap that we get probably in faculty lounges all of this country, as the true eggheads among us who think they’re the best and the brightest sit around and theorize and pontificate on how they are the only ones capable of understanding the nature of the problem, and therefore they are the only ones capable of dealing with it and understanding it, when they haven’t the slightest idea. They lead the parade of cowardice, unwilling to even identify this for what it is.
Now, I don’t want to be misunderstood. The grievance industry is real, and it has dramatic impact. The grievance industry, primarily in domestic politics in this country, but it transcends domestic. The grievance industry is rooted in anybody with a grievance against anybody in power, particularly the United States, is valid. All grievances are valid. They’re all justified and therefore must be taken seriously and must be addressed.
Now, I don’t think that ISIS, ISIL, Al-Qaeda, I don’t think they have any grievance against us other than the fact that we exist. I, again, need to emphasize my view that what we’re dealing with here is a raw ideology that is disguised as a religion, rather brilliantly and on purpose, by the way. You call it a religion, and it automatically takes on unassailable characteristics. But it is an ideology.
They don’t have any grievance against us ’cause of our civil rights record. They don’t have any grievance against us for this or that. Their grievance, if you call it that, is actually their claim that we have no right to exist unless we recognize their religion. It is their ideology, not their grievances, it’s their ideology that tells them to make war on nonbelievers, or non-Muslims. And that, in turn, requires this jihad against Western civilization, not just the US, but the civilized world.
There’s no policy change we could make that would calm these people down. And that’s what I mean by they’re not actually grievance related. Now, Hillary thinks they are. This is the point. Hillary and Obama and the rest of these people, they all think they are grievance related, and that’s why they think if they make changes in US policy, that we can buy these people off. Such as closing Guantanamo Bay; such as blaming this poor sap that made this video that nobody saw. So if we make subtle or dramatic policy changes we can send the message that we’re no longer George W. Bush. We’re not these Cowboys riding all over the world killing people that disagree with us.
So they think it is grievance. They think everything else is. They themselves have grievances against this country that were fomented when they were in college, or even before that, by their mentors and their parents and their friends, whoever. And because of their arrogance they think everybody looks at the world the way they do. So if they have grievances against the US and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad comes out and lists his, hey, they understand.
Have you ever noticed how similar Ahmadinejad sounds about the US when the Democrats talk about it? I’m not trying to be needlessly provocative here. It’s something I noticed during the 2012 campaign, 2008 campaign. Every Democrat was listing complaints about this country. Mario Cuomo did it back in 1984. This speech that he was heralded for was a list of grievances against the US and Ronald Reagan. And you hear our enemies listing the same things.
So my point is that leadership in this country, Democrat leadership, they have their grievances against this country, and they think that they’re justified, obviously. So when they hear somebody around the world with grievances, they have maybe a little bit of relatability. But the mistake they make is assuming that our enemies have the same grievance or problem with the US that they do. And they’re missing the boat entirely when it comes to militant Islam.
The only grievance that militant Islam has about us is that we exist and that we are nonbelievers. And that’s it. But boy, you don’t say that. No. That’s not smart power. That’s not empathy. That’s not understanding their perspective and point of view. That’s needless name-calling. That’s just personal and uncalled for.
So we’re hamstrung. Even at the White House, two hours after the event, we can’t call it what it is. And this stuff is going to keep happening. I mentioned yesterday that I have in my accumulating Stack of Stuff, starting with show prep over the weekend for my return to the air chair on Monday — I should dig this out in the Stack. There’s a column that ran in The Economist, which is a UK publication, focuses on economics, but it’s actually like a TIME Magazine. It’s the UK version of TIME in one sense. They had a whole story on the fearfulness plaguing America, that our children are fearful, that their parents are fearful, that parents are raising children in fear, afraid to let them go on sled rides down a hill near the house. Never know what calamity could occur.
And their point is that we’re raising a whole generation or two of people that are not prepared. They’re fearful and they’ve been led to believe that people don’t like us are justified and have reasons for it. But the fearfulness is the point. It’s permeating everything, including speech.
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