RUSH: I don’t want to put this off to the side. It has nothing to do with the debate.

It has everything to do with current events in America, but it’s about something that happened in Germany, and it’s about the immigrants and the refugees and so forth, and I don’t want to put this aside and not get to it as I’ve been doing with things all week. The story is from New Delhi television. “Poll: 40% of Germans Want Merkel to Resign Over Refugee policy — Forty percent of Germans say that Chancellor Angela Merkel should resign over her refugee policy, a poll showed on Friday.” Forty percent of Germans want Angela Merkel to quit. They want her to resign.

They want her to wave good-bye and leave “over her refugee policy, a poll showed [today] in a sign of rising dissatisfaction with her welcoming stance towards people fleeing conflict and economic hardship in the Middle East and Africa. Merkel, who enjoyed record high popularity ratings early last year, has grown increasingly isolated in recent months as members of her conservative bloc,” (snickers) conservative bloc; right, “have pressed her to take a tougher line on asylum seekers and European allies have dragged their feet on the issue.

“Responding to popular pressure, Merkel’s conservatives and their left-leaning Social Democrat coalition partners agreed on Thursday to tighten asylum rules…” Here’s my question. Let’s review what happened. When the latest wave of refugees from war-torn Syria began and they were going through Greece and other European Union nations, and they were mostly “male, military-aged men” as they were being described. There were very few women, very few crumb crunchers. So there was a suspicion: “Why are these able-bodied, military-aged men fleeing their own countries rather than staying there fighting for their own countries?

“Why are they leaving in droves — I mean, to the tunes of tens of thousands, if not more?” And then the next question: “Why in the world is Angela Merkel welcoming them?” It was so bad, she was bragging about the openness of Germany, and she was bragging about the fact that they were gonna have 800,000 of them a year that would be allowed to emigrate to Germany and eventually become citizens. I don’t know if it was stated, but the widely believed reason was that Germany’s birthrate is below replacement levels, for whatever reason.

People are having fewer and fewer kids, or not at all. There are more abortions. Those are on the rise or whatever. But the birthrate is not high enough to maintain Germany’s population as it is at present, and one of the dangers of that is that there aren’t enough Germans being born who will grow up to do the work in the German economy necessary to keep it humming. And so the theory was Angela Merkel is excited and she’s welcoming because this is the immediate solution to the labor force problem. And when all this was going down, everybody was asking:

“Has she lost her mind? What the hell is she thinking, taking 800,000 and bragging about it?” And then we started hearing what was happening in Cologne and other parts of Germany where these very refugees were engaging in massive amounts of abuse of women, even rape in some cases, so bad that they had to have seminars with ’em to find out why these men thought that they had open season on German women. I’m not making this up. Typical of liberals.

Here comes a bunch of foreign refugees, they immediately start mistreating the women in the country, and the powers that be in Germany say, “Gosh, what did we do to cause this?” Just like after 9/11 so many of our elites asked, “Gee, what did we do to make them so mad that they wanted to blow up the World Trade Center?” In other words: “Why do they hate us? What did we do? Is it our fault?” So they were having seminars with these men, and these men were saying, “Well, hey, when we go someplace and we see these women with bare shoulders, in our country — if that’s ever permitted — it sends a signal. Or when a woman smiles at you, that’s a come-on.”

These guys were telling the German officials this. So they were sitting down and having seminars with these immigrants saying, “No, no, no, no. You must understand that when Germans dance, it doesn’t mean they want to have sex in minutes, and when a woman smiles at you, it’s nothing more than, ‘Hi. How are you?'” But the question in the first place is: Why did she act like she did at the very beginning? When the whole process started, here she was practically alone in being excited about it, bragging about it, talking about 800,000.

And everybody could see this was gonna be the ruination of Germany. Everybody could see this is the absolutely wrong thing. Why did she do it? And the answer to that question, I think, is the same answer that we would get when we ask the same question here: “What in the world is our establishment doing? What does the Chamber of Commerce not get? What do all of these ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ people not get? Why don’t they understand that millions of illegals who can’t speak English, who have no education and no job skills, can’t help? How in the world does that help this country? What in the world are they thinking?”

We’re asking the same question.

So in Angela Merkel’s case: “Why do it?”

I have no doubt. I think the answer is multipronged. I think she did it in large part because she wanted to show the world that she was not racist or bigoted, and that she wanted to show compassion. It echoes the same sentiments we get here from leftists in this country: “Well, if somebody is war torn and beat up and poor and they want to come to my country to improve their lives, I am not going to be the one to say they can’t come.” Something like that — or maybe something even more hideous. Now, we know what it is in this country. We know the Chamber of Commerce loves cheap labor. Only the Democrats are looking at as a voter-registration drive, and everything else they say is a lie.

It isn’t about improving the US economy. It’s not about jobs Americans won’t do. It isn’t about compassion, which is what they really rely on. I mean, that’s what the Democrats always rely on, to gain a moral superiority for every one of their policies, is claim it’s all rooted in compassion, understanding and fairness. You leave this country and the constitution in their hands and it becomes a suicide pact. That’s what the American people know, and that’s why amnesty, illegal immigration is and is going to remain the primary seminal issue throughout this presidential campaign.

Anyway, in Germany they’re now saying, “Wait a minute.” They want her to quit. They want this stopped. There was nothing good that was ever gonna happen, everybody knew it at the beginning, but she did it anyway. Merkel did it anyway. I don’t doubt she did it to curry favor with international partners like Obama, the United Nations. You know, Germany and Europe is the equivalent of the US in the sense that whenever anybody’s out of money, that’s where they go to get it. And I think she has a guilt complex about being one of the few countries in the European Union that’s not in as dire straits as everybody else is.

But it’s senseless. And these are the supposed smartest, the best and brightest among us, and we heard yesterday what’s happening in Sweden and what’s going on in Denmark. In Denmark they’re seizing the property of these refugees and immigrants. Denmark! I mean, that’s crazy Bernie’s ideal country, and they are seizing possessions and property, ’cause they can’t afford to provide everything for these people. They can’t afford to feed everybody. They can’t afford to house everybody. They can’t afford everybody’s medical care, and yet the assumption is that it will be provided.

Every one of these people arriving is assuming they’re gonna get some place to live paid for, they’re gonna have clothes paid for, they’re gonna have school for their kids paid for. If their kids come with them, they’re going to have whatever. They need medical care, it’s gonna be provided. That’s the assumption they all arrive with. And I find it fascinating. All of these leftists in all of these European countries, these Democrat socialist countries, are finally starting to realize they don’t have the money for this. It’s one thing when they do all this for their own citizens, I guess, who can vote.

My point is there’s some common sense surfacing now in Europe over all this. And yet in this country we keep hearing from people like Obama and others that we can’t turn ’em away, we must allow them in. That’s who we are. We cannot allow our values to be comprised. Blah, blah, blah. Our values are not a suicide pact.