RUSH: There are a couple of columns today on the Syria business. One of them is by Conrad Black, who we recently interviewed for the Limbaugh Letter.
He’s got a great book out called Flight of the Eagle, and it is great historical recounting of the transformation of this country from its founding to a world power, superpower. It’s really done well, and Conrad had a piece yesterday in the New York Sun that is just devastating. It’s about Syria, but about this administration and its… Well, you could call it incompetence or its level of deceit or what have you, and the paragraph on John Kerry — which I’ll get to in just a second. I don’t mean to be teasing you but it’s gonna go with some sound bites I’ve got.
The paragraph on John Kerry is just one of my favorites aspects or parts of the column. There’s another piece the Wall Street Journal today by Norman Podhoretz, a man I’ve gotten to know over the years via my friendship with Mr. Buckley, and this one warms my heart, not because I’m mentioned in it, because I’m mentioned in practically everything these days. This warms my heart because Mr. Podhoretz’s basic point is what we’re looking at here is not incompetence.
Go back to what Obama said five days before the 2008 election. He said that we’re five days away from “fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” and I took him at his word, just like Mr. Podhoretz apparently has. His point is that none of this is really due to incompetence, that all of this is happening on purpose; that Barack Obama had a desire to downsize the United States, particularly on the world stage, and to preside over the decline of the United States of America.
Because he thought that was what this country needed, that we have been unjust, immoral — these are my words, not Norman’s. But the point is that everything was going along just fine. Obama is very good at this. Where Obama is crafty is he never gives away what he’s a doing. The Limbaugh Theorem. He’s always able to convince people he’s trying to build this country, he’s trying to save this country, trying to revitalize it, while he’s doing just the exact opposite.
His point is that what’s happened in Syria and in Libya has given Obama opportunities to speed the decline of America that he didn’t anticipate. So these events, while everybody is looking at them from the standpoint of Obama’s incoherence and incompetence, everybody needs to stop and just listen to what Obama said himself before the 2008 election and realize that what is being done here is by design, which is why it’s close to my heart because I have made the same claim, both to you on this program and others.
Remember I mentioned it to Chris Wallace when I sat for a rare, wide-ranging interview on the Fox News Channel’s Fox News Sunday program. At the time, the discussion was about the economy, and I said, “Chris, I think it’s all being done on purpose.” You could tell he didn’t get it. He takes me seriously, but he wondered I meant. The look on his face said, “What are you trying to do?” I said, “I’m being totally honest with you here. I’m not trying to stir anything up.” I happen to be able to do that by breathing.
“I’m not saying something I don’t believe here. I really believe it,” and Obama is not the only one. This is what the left has designed since the days of Woodrow Wilson. I mean it’s right out there for everybody to see. It’s as plain as day. It’s as easy to understand as what the Soviet Union was all about. They were very honest about it. The American left didn’t want to accept it or didn’t want it known. Others thought that it was ragtag extremists who believe it.
But I do.
I mean, they telegraph what they stand for. They tell us every day what they stand for. They make no bones about their opinion of this country. They don’t like it. They don’t like it as a superpower. They don’t like when its economy is governed and dominated by capitalism. They just don’t like it, for a whole host of reasons. You had Woodrow Wilson and FDR, and this is the third major one. Well, LBJ. Throw him in there. This is the fourth major attempt the left has made to fundamentally transform this country.
It’s what Podhoretz’s piece is about, and I’m gonna share with you excerpts of bottom of this, both of these pieces.
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RUSH: Also we’ve got audio sound bites. Kerry has drawn a new red line. They’ve given Assad a week. Assad was on CBS with Charlie… Charlie… Charlie Rose, saying, “Well, I didn’t do it, and you don’t have any evidence that I do it,” meaning let go the nerve gas. There are some theories now that Obama really doesn’t want to do this and is looking for a way out of it. It’s just a balancing act. Are we really looking at incoherent incompetence or is this the continuing decline of America by design?
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RUSH: Norman Podhoretz: “Obama’s Successful Foreign Failure,” and this is in the Wall Street Journal: “It is entirely understandable that Barack Obama’s way of dealing with Syria in recent weeks should have elicited responses ranging from puzzlement to disgust. Even members of his own party are despairingly echoing in private the public denunciations of him as ‘incompetent,’ ‘bungling,’ ‘feckless,’ ‘amateurish’ and ‘in over his head’ coming from his political opponents on the right.
“For how else to characterize a president who declares war against what he calls a great evil demanding immediate extirpation and in the next breath announces that he will postpone taking action for at least 10 days — and then goes off to play golf before embarking on a trip to another part of the world? As if this were not enough, he also assures the perpetrator of that great evil that the military action he will eventually take will last a very short time and will do hardly any damage.
“Unless, that is, he fails to get the unnecessary permission he has sought from Congress, in which case … he might not take any military action after all.” That is a great paragraph. That summarizes exactly where we are. Obama draws the red line against a great evil; then in the next breath says he’s gonna postpone taking any action until Congress gets back despite people being nerve gassed. Then he goes out and plays golf and plans another trip, then comes back, and then says, “By the way, I’m not gonna do this unless Congress goes along with me,” and then goes and plays golf.
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RUSH: Back to Mr. Podhoretz’s piece, and let me go through this ‘graph again.
He opens by detailing some of the descriptions of Obama coming even from his party. He’s “‘incompetent,’ ‘bungling,’ ‘feckless,’ ‘amateurish’ and ‘in over his head'” and then he says, “[H]ow else to characterize a president who declares war against what he calls a great evil,” that would be Bashar Assad, “demanding immediate extirpation and in the next breath announces that he will postpone taking action for at least 10 days — and then goes off to play golf before embarking on a trip to another part of the world?
“As if this were not enough, he also assures the perpetrator of that great evil that the military action he will eventually take will last a very short time and will do hardly any damage. Unless, that is, he fails to get the unnecessary permission he has sought from Congress, in which case … he might not take any military action after all.” After all of this bluster, after all of the descriptions of the horrors and the evil, he might not do anything at all. It depends on whether Congress goes along.
Summing up the net effect of all this, Conrad Black (whose piece I also mentioned to you). I have it here, Conrad Black in the New York Sun yesterday. Listen to this paragraph, folks. “Not since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, and prior to that the fall of France in 1940, has there been so swift an erosion of the world influence of a Great Power as we are witnessing with the United States.” Bingo! Right on the money. Does anybody really think it’s due to incompetence?
Five years of incompetence? Five years of incoherence, five years of bungling, feckless, amateurish, in-over-his-head behavior? It’s been five years of it, almost, a little over four and a half. Really? All this is being done on purpose? I mean all of this is just happening accidentally? Obama really wants this to be strongest country in the world? He really does, really, really — just like he really, really wants to create jobs? You know what that number is, by the way?
There are 90 million Americans not working, folks. Ninety million adult human beings in the United States, a record number not in the labor force. Ten million of them are Obama’s. Two million people a year have left the labor force under Obama while he’s had 19 different efforts at creating jobs and growing the economy. I’m gonna tell you, smart people are starting to ask this question: “Is this really incompetence, or is something else at work here?”
I had thought this was going to happen by design, because I know who liberals are, and that’s why I said, “I hope he fails.” Now back to Mr. Podhoretz. “Yet if this is indeed the pass to which Mr. Obama has led us — and I think it is — let me suggest that it signifies not how incompetent and amateurish the president is, but how skillful. His foreign policy, far from a dismal failure, is a brilliant success as measured by what he intended all along to accomplish.
“The accomplishment would not have been possible if the intention had been too obvious,” meaning he couldn’ta gotten elected by telling everybody what he intended to do. The country is not populated with a majority of people who want us in a constant state of decline. Americans love being number one. What if Obama had said in his 2008 campaign, “We’ve been number one too long. It’s time to let somebody else do it! We’ve been number one and we’ve done it in an immoral way”?
Do you think he woulda gotten elected? No way, Jose! No chance. “His foreign policy, far from a dismal failure, is a brilliant success as measured by what he intended all along to accomplish. The accomplishment would not have been possible if the intention had been too obvious. The skill lies in how effectively he has used rhetorical tricks to disguise it. The key to understanding what Mr. Obama has pulled off is the astonishing statement he made in the week before being elected president: ‘We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.'”
I remember that and I took him at his word. It was easy to. He’d said enough in his past to give a clear indication of what that meant. “To those of you…” This is Mr. Podhoretz writing: “To those of us who took this declaration seriously, it meant that Mr. Obama really was the left-wing radical he seemed to be, given his associations with the likes of the anti-American preacher Jeremiah Wright and the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, not to mention the intellectual influence over him of Saul Alinsky, the original ‘community organizer.’
“So far as domestic affairs were concerned, it soon became clear — even to some of those who had persuaded themselves that Mr. Obama was a moderate and a pragmatist — that the fundamental transformation he had in mind was to turn this country into as close a replica of the social-democratic countries of Europe as the constraints of our political system allowed. Since he had enough support for the policies that this objective entailed, those constraints were fairly loose, and so he only needed a minimum of rhetorical deception in pursuing it.
“All it took was to deny he was doing what he was doing by frequently singing the praises of the free-enterprise system he was assiduously working to undermine, by avoiding the word ‘socialism,’ by invoking ‘fairness’ as an overriding ideal and by playing on resentment of the ‘rich.'” Bingo, bingo, bingo. One thousand percent right. “But,” Mr. Podhoretz writes, “foreign policy was another matter. As a left-wing radical, Mr. Obama believed that the United States had almost always been a retrograde and destructive force in world affairs.”
Bingo again. The United States is the problem in the world, not the solution. That’s what Obama was raised believing. That’s what he was taught everywhere he went. Folks, this is important for you to understand and know as this Syria thing plays out. It’s important to understand what the real objectives are. The inside the Beltway conventional wisdom-formula followers are treating this as though it’s any other event in the Middle East with any other president competing with or dealing with the usual forces opposing each other there.
This is not what’s going on.
We’re outside the formula. We’re outside the conventional wisdom. We’re outside the box here. The standard, inside-the-Beltway analysis is not gonna tell anybody anything about what’s really happening in this situation. You can turn on TV, you can look at any Middle East analyst, you can listen to anybody from past administration or what have you, and if they’re talking about this in any way other than what we’re discussing today, they’re just following the formula.
They are not getting at the truth.
It may be that they know it and purposely want to avoid it.
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RUSH: But here’s Podhoretz. Let me finish this one paragraph on foreign policy. “As a left-wing radical, Mr. Obama believed that the United States had almost always been a retrograde and destructive force in world affairs. Accordingly, the fundamental transformation he wished to achieve here was to reduce the country’s power and influence. And just as he had to fend off the still-toxic socialist label at home, so he had to take care not to be stuck with the equally toxic ‘isolationist’ label abroad,” and he goes on to describe the fortuitous events taking place now that are actually facilitating and helping Obama reduce America’s power and influence.
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RUSH: Checked the e-mail again. “Rush, you’ve been saying this for five years. Why are you quoting these guys?” I like being joined, folks. I like being joined. I like other people finally being able to come forth and say it, what we’ve been saying here for five years. Podhoretz and Black are, well, a couple of mental giants, and it’s great to be joined. You know how that feels.
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RUSH: I’m looking for the great paragraph that Conrad Black wrote on John Kerry, and it’s not here, and I don’t want to paraphrase this, and I just now discovered it as I’m getting ready for this hour. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Ah, here it is. Here it is. You gotta listen to this. This is Conrad Black. This is in the New York Sun yesterday. This whole piece is a companion piece, essentially, to Norman Podhoretz’s piece.
The whole thing is a must read, but listen to this paragraph on John Kerry: “Until recently, it would have been unimaginable to conceive of John Kerry as the strongman of the National Security Council. This is the man who attended political catechism classes from the North Vietnamese to memorize and repeat their accusations against his country of war crimes in Indochina, and, inter alia, ran for president in 2004 asserting that while he had voted to invade Iraq in 2003, he was not implicated in that decision because he did not vote to fund the invasion once underway.
“(Perhaps Thomas E. Dewey would have been an upset presidential winner in 1944 if he had proclaimed his support for the D-Day landings but advocated an immediate cut-off of funds for General EisenhowerÂ’s armies of liberation.)” This just cuts Kerry to the quick. I mean, John Kerry, being where he is, is the most out-of-place, irresponsible act you could conceive of. The idea that Kerry is in the position of strongman here is an indication to a lot of us that Obama is not serious about this.
You’ve got somebody who thinks that America is the problem in the world on point on all this. But Conrad Black’s piece along with Norman Podhoretz is a good piece and as I say I’m happy they’re there because I like being joined, and I wish more people would be. I wish more people would just abandon this formulaic, inside-the-Beltway analysis that everybody gives issues like this and understand what’s really going on here. It’s plain as day. Everybody knows it.
They’re just afraid to say it, because, like the Hollywood leftists have admitted, they’re just scared to death of being seen as anti-black. Ed Asner: “A lot of people in Hollywood don’t want to feel anti-black” by being opposed to Obama. But they are opposed to Obama. They’re just afraid to say it. Now, you would think of anybody who would feel free to criticize Obama on anti-war principles, it would be the devoted Hollywood left.
But even they won’t — and in their minds, their credentials on race are unassailable. Nobody could ever accuse them of being racists. Why, they are liberals because of the civil rights movement! But even they are afraid of being seen by others as “anti-black” if they are true to themselves and their anti-war positions. So I would submit to you that all of you wondering why there’s no opposition to Obama, you know it. His race has paralyzed all opposition.
His race has paralyzed all political opposition inside the Beltway, party political opposition, the Republican Party, you name it. Members of his own party are whispering that they don’t like this at all. The Democrat Party is an anti-war party. They are being made to look like the biggest bunch of hypocrites ever, and they’re having to swallow it. Bought they see, too, do not want to run the risk of being seen as anti-black. So nobody, it appears, thinks they can be seen as just anti-Obama.
Being “anti-Obama” means being “anti-black guy.” What of this colorblind society that everybody’s always demanding, hoping for, wishing for, asking for? Here’s the opportunity to be colorblind! I’m colorblind. I don’t care. The guy’s president of the United States. All that matter to his are his ideas, his policies, and what he does. I couldn’t care less about his race. That’s the definition of colorblind.
Yet that will not be permitted.