RUSH: By the way, folks, I didn’t hear about this when it happened. I missed this, and that’s really rare. The New York Times had a major story in their magazine. Well, not the magazine, but the Sunday op-ed page, the review section of the New York Times back on February 17th. And the headline: “Russia Isn’t the Only One Meddling in Elections. We Do It, Too.” This is a huge — I mean, it’s a long story. When I say huge, big. It’s by Scott Shane.
“Bags of cash delivered to a Rome hotel for favored Italian candidates. Scandalous stories leaked to foreign newspapers to swing an election in Nicaragua. Millions of pamphlets, posters and stickers printed to defeat an incumbent in Serbia. The long arm of Vladimir Putin? No, just a small sample of the United States’ history of intervention in foreign elections.
“On Tuesday, American intelligence chiefs warned the Senate Intelligence Committee that Russia appears to be preparing to repeat in the 2018 midterm elections the same full-on chicanery it unleashed in 2016: hacking, leaking, social media manipulation and possibly more. Then on Friday, Robert Mueller, the special counsel, announced the indictments of 13 Russians and three companies,” the troll farms.
This is back in February. This is not the indictment of last Friday. Run by a businessman with cl. Anyway, the story goes on to detail all of the meddling by the United States intelligence community in the elections of foreign countries!
Now, when I say “big,” it’s only big because — it’s not anything I don’t know. This is why this whole meddling story has not caused a ripple with me. It’s because it’s the name of the game. Every world power is attempting to run sabotage on every other world power. None of it is new. And you want to be better at it than your enemies.
But this entire meddling story has worn me out because it’s been presented as a first-time-ever, one-way-only story. It’s never happened before except the Russians are doing it, and they started it during the Obama administration and it ended up getting Trump elected, and that’s the story, and it’s bogus. What nobody’s asking is, if the Russians were doing all of this when Brennan and Clapper and Comey and McCabe and Obama were in power, then why didn’t they stop it? Why all of a sudden is it incumbent on Trump to take the blame for this when it was all happening when he was barely a candidate?
And their answer is, “Well, because Trump was colluding with them.” Except that he wasn’t! There has never been any evidence of it. That has been one of the most absurd charges ever. It’s really rubbed me wrong that anybody, on our side especially, would think that that’s possible. But they have. Such is their personal distaste and dislike for Donald Trump.
There’s been a lot of things in the media in this country over the last three or four years that have appalled me. But most of them have nothing to do with what Russians did, because the Russians are doing what they always do. The Russians have infiltrated the education system. The Russians have infiltrated so much of popular culture, you wouldn’t believe it unless it was pointed out directly to you, and then you would.
The idea that this is all brand-new because Donald Trump is brand-new and it’s never happened before is a crock. We always do it. We’re constantly destabilizing Central American regimes, eastern European regimes, constantly. Same thing we did in World War II trying to destabilize Hitler and the people were facing then. Same thing we did with the Japanese in World War II.
The idea that any of this is brand-new and exclusive Donald Trump, that’s what rubbed me wrong. Who’s stupid enough to believe that? But it’s the power of the media being able to set that narrative each and every day and pummel it so that people do end up thinking, “My gosh. This has never happened before, and the Russians are succeeding because Trump’s on their team” and so forth.
Nobody ever stops to ask, well, why didn’t Obama, why didn’t Brennan, why didn’t Clapper, if they knew it was going on, why didn’t they stop it? Obama said (imitating Obama), “Well, I did. I told I told Putin cut it out. I was very forceful. I said, ‘You cut it out.'” And of course Putin quaking in his boots here at little Obama telling him to cut it out. It’s just so much naivete apparent in the reporting of all of this.
And that’s what’s been appalling to me, this lack of understanding of how the real world works, the lack of understanding, what it means to be the nation’s number one leading superpower and the good guys and how at risk we are in a dangerous world simply because of our power and status. And people not having the ability to use that framework in which to plug all of these events into to help them understand it.
But if you’ve been raised, if you’ve grown up, if you’re 34, 42, 45 years old, if your educational experience is the United States is the problem in the world because of our colonization, because of racism, because our bigotry, because of our unfairness, because of our superpower status, if you think that we’re immoral and legitimate, that’s what you’ve been taught, then it’s easy to construct a narrative where the U.S. is to blame for all of this and in fact then deserves a comeuppance here and there, like people flooding our border.
We deserve it. We’re the ones that made ’em poor in the first place, is how the story goes. The lack of understanding of the United States as the last best hope for freedom, the lack of teaching, the lack of understanding the United States’ role in the world vis-a-vis freedom and liberty, economic prosperity, the lack of appreciation and understanding for that because it hasn’t been taught, is what allows all this other gibberish to be taught as though there’s some sort of a moral equivalence that we’re no better than anybody else, there’s no such thing as American exceptionalism, when there clearly is.
Then you got such hypocritical behavior. You know, one year the Democrats love the Soviet Union and they love Russia and they’re working to help the Russians build client states all over our hemisphere. Then the next year they’re mad that Trump won’t kill Putin at a summit meeting. They’re mad that Trump won’t pull out a .45 and level the guy for stealing the election from Hillary! Trump’s the one that should make that right. When that’s not even what happened. So I guess the overall thing that bothers me is the rising tide of genuine ignorance, which is a by-product of a skewed and corrupt education system.
Anyway, let me get back to the phones, ’cause I could stay on this riff for the rest hour, but I need to get back to the phones, I promised.
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