RUSH: Okay, Mrs. Clinton is in London, and again she just repeated how there is no international prohibition against the United States supplying the Libyan rebels with ammo and guns. So they are definitely preparing us for this. We are preparing to arm the rebels. Folks, let me just say it straight up: There is no question in my mind that Barack Obama thinks the path back to the White House goes through Tripoli. The path to the White House goes through Tripoli and taking out Khadafy. He has to. The way this is shaping up — with what Mrs. Clinton is saying, what Obama said last night, with his criticism of Bush and Clinton — he has to take Khadafy out.
Khadafy has to go. Khadafy will go. That’s what this means. And when it all happens, it will be because of the steel resolve of Obama and his words, his inspiration, and the fear he instills in the hearts of bad guys. I’m just warning you. And Mrs. Clinton said, “We cannot impose our will on the people of Libya.” The people of Wisconsin’ are a different matter and the people of Arizona, different matter. We’ll be happy to impose our will on the people of Arizona and Wisconsin, but we’re not gonna impose our will on the people of Libya or Syria.
Here’s Michael in Cedar City, Utah. Great to have you, sir, on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hello.
CALLER: Hi. Thank you very much for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: I’m really worried after listening to the speech, I have a feeling there’s an impostor or doppelganger or something going on here, because for years we’ve heard him talk about and apologize for actions like this from America —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — and that he’s proud of America, his wife for the first time because he’s dominated, what’s going on? I don’t understand.
RUSH: 2012, reelection. Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. You’re talking about Obama talk about freedom and the United States is the engine of freedom. We guarantee it and anybody who wants it, they have to call us, we’re the only people that can guarantee it, fight for it, give it to ’em. American exceptionalism, all of that, right? You heard that last night. I couldn’t believe it.
CALLER: I couldn’t. I was stunned. This is not the America I heard him describe, ever.
RUSH: No. But it’s called reelection 2012. It’s “2012 or Bust” time, is what this is. He’s lost the independents. He lost the independents in the November election. He’s gotta get the independents back. Remember, now, when he ran for election — when he ran against America — he was running against an unpopular George W. Bush and against an unpopular Bush policy: Iraq. It wasn’t until he was elected that he actually ran around and started apologizing for the country. It wasn’t until after he was elected that people’s radar was tuned on. Ours, you and I, we knew all long, but it wasn’t ’til after the election that people started wondering: Does this guy really not like the country that much?
Now he’s got to make it look like he does. We’re in reelection mode. Remember, now: Liberals can never be honest about who they are and get elected, particularly in a national election. So I want to just… You know, Michael, be prepared because not only are you frustrated but you are gonna get doubly frustrated as people believe this going into the campaign. You’re gonna get doubly frustrated when you hear the liberal hacks on all the cable networks talk about American exceptionalism and how Obama defines it in fact. You’re gonna have your intelligence insulted multiple times a day, multiple times a night.
You’re gonna be asking yourself, “Do people not remember the past two years?” You’re gonna be asking yourself that — and the reason is, it’s similar to the monologue I dug into last week in Wisconsin. We do things by the rules. We persuade hearts and minds and then we go have an election and then we win. So we think it’s time to implement our ideas. When we lose elections what do we do? We say, “They won. They get their judges. They get this or that.” They never lose. They’ll thwart the democratic process at all costs. Now, there’s, I think, another way to explain this to people.
You can do it. It’s hard hitting, but you can do it within the entire context of freedom. Have you ever noticed that leftists, wherever they are — here in America or the Soviet Union or Cuba — have to wage war on freedom? They have to wage war on liberty. Liberty and freedom are the enemies to their existence. They are statists, authoritarians. They believe in dictatorship, tyranny, central planning, and control. We, on the other hand, believe in freedom. We welcome it. We want it for everybody. We don’t try to impose a thing on people. Now, liberalism, leftism, communism, Marxism, whatever it is, is an enemy. We fight it, but not in the same way they fight us. They can never rest. If there is freedom anywhere, liberalism is threatened. We, on the other hand, never feel threatened when people are free, even to be liberals.
So whereas it is not our natural inclination to eliminate them — not just from positions of power, but from virtual existence — it is their objective to eliminate any opposition that is rooted in freedom. It’s the #1 enemy they face. So we win the election. Scott Walker wins in Wisconsin. We implement policies that were campaigned on. Those policies are in direct contradiction and they contravene the beliefs of the American left, and they challenge their bread and butter. They challenge their economics; they challenge their lifestyles. So anything is fair game to defeat, impugn, get rid of or what have you their enemies in Wisconsin — and they’ll stop at nothing. The law doesn’t stop them (you know, a fake judge, renegade judge or what have you). So we’re fighting, you know, with two different, completely different motivations.
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RUSH: Stateburg, South Carolina. Hi, Thomas. You’re next on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hello.
CALLER: Hey. Good afternoon. Episcopal priest dittos from Stateburg, South Carolina.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I approach you with a heavy heart realizing that I’m a graduate of the EIB Institute 1992, and I just graduated up into your inter-apostolic circle. So I approach you on my knees.
RUSH: I appreciate that. Thank you. The only problem is there really aren’t any graduates here of the Limbaugh Institute. There are no degrees because the learning never stops.
CALLER: Absolutely. I totally agree.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: But my understanding of your worldview in respect to the Constitution is that you believe in Locke’s philosophy that men inherently long for freedom. Is that correct?
RUSH: You mean Locke?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Locke’s philosophy: Men inherently long for freedom?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: I happen to believe that that is the yearning of the human spirit, yes, yearning. I think that’s how we’re created, I do.
CALLER: Okay. I do, because this eclipses Augustine’s worldview that the West — in my opinion — Augustine’s worldview mixed in with a little bit of the enlightenment, but predominantly Augustine’s worldview approaches humanity that humanity is fallen, and that there is nothing inherently good in man. And so the reason I asked this question is, if we approach philosophically Locke’s view of the Constitution, then we’re gonna be forever deploying our military in a state of perpetual war to spread democracy to people who inherently, because of their religious worldview, can be done (unintelligible).
RUSH: Really… No, no, no. If you’re going to discuss the descent and the fall of humanity in Locke versus Augustine, you’ve gotta go all the way back to the first, maybe even the second glacial age and —
CALLER: (laughing) You got that right.
RUSH: — and come forward. The very notion here that we are using our military to spread freedom and democracy around the world is a false premise. It is a misnomer. It is not at all what the United States has done. Now, President Obama may be giving the impression that that’s what we are doing here because he thinks this is what people want to hear. What President Obama’s doing is getting himself reelected. President Obama doesn’t care about whether the people of Libya are free or not. George W. Bush did care about whether the people of Iraq were free or not. That’s his religious belief, and he’s manifestly animated by that.
CALLER: But you supported that mission, and — correct me if I’m wrong —
RUSH: I supported that mission, and I supported that mission on a preemptive basis because it was right after 9/11; he would not confirm or disprove the notion he had weapons of mass destruction. Once something like 9/11 happens to you, and you’re president of the United States, and your constitutional duty is to defend and protect the people and the Constitution, once we find out what our enemies are capable of and they’re threatening to do it again, you stop them because you’re protecting the American people. You’re not spreading democracy around the world. If we were spreading democracy around the world we wouldn’t have engaged in half the military operations we have. How were we spreading freedom and democracy when we annihilated Nagasaki and Hiroshima?
CALLER: Well, see, now you’re getting into a totally different type of conflict, of World War II via the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.
RUSH: I’m not changing conflicts.
CALLER: (unintelligible)
RUSH: You have stated a blanket purpose to which you think I ascribe, and that is the use of the US military to spread freedom and democracy around the world because you think you nabbed me in a trick question.
CALLER: No, you just explained the Augustinian view of war.
RUSH: You asked me a trick question: “Do I believe in the natural yearning of the human spirit to be free?” I said, “Yes,” and you think you have me in a trap. You don’t have me in a trap. That has nothing to do with US military operations. It has nothing to do with what I think the purpose of the US military’s foreign policy is. I’m telling you what I believe is the creation of man, how I think. That’s my personal belief. Pure and simple.
You think that that personal belief leads me to support constant use of the US military to spread freedom and democracy. I point out to you: Who was free and who was democratic after we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki? We were. We were defending and protecting ourselves and our military armed forces in the region who were on the way to being slaughtered. Look, if you want to try this kind of stuff, call the guys at National Review. They’d love to talk to you about this kind of stuff, but you cannot trick me into it.
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Locke himself did not urge that a society had to spread what it believed in order to survive, and the Founders of our country didn’t, either. They wrote the Declaration of Independence for us, for them, the United States of America. There’s nothing that says, “And it’s only gonna work if you go to Libya and do it there. It’s only gonna work if you go to Iraq and do it there.” That’s not what they said. In fact, if you take this and run around the world and try to spread this you’re gonna destroy your own society. What they argued for in all of this was prudence, and that was doing what’s necessary to preserve our society. That’s why the whole question of what’s the US national interest in Libya. That’s why it’s come up. It was in our national interests to do Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It was in our national interests to take on Hitler and the Axis powers, Japan and so forth in World War II. That was prudence. We were trying to preserve our society.
Now, somewhere, some people have gotten the notion that in the effort to preserve our own society, we somehow have to run around and do that around the world and then they want to jump on you and say you can’t, it’s none of our business, because they’re not like us. And that’s what his opening question was, a trick question: “Do you believe that the national yearning of man is to be free?” Yeah, I do. He interpreted that as meaning I think we should use the military to run around and get rid of every dictator there is. Only if it’s in our national interests do we do that. That’s my belief. (interruption) Snerdley, “Is not the spread of democracy inherently in our interests?” You can’t say that. What you can say is that the stopping of the spread of tyranny and authoritarianism is. It’s what I was talking about a moment ago in trying to explain the difference between the left and us. They have to come after us. They have to wipe us out. They cannot peacefully co-exist with us, because they do not allow for freedom.
We are all about freedom. If there was one state in this country that were free and the other 49, or 56 if you’re Obama, happen to be totally authoritarian they would be targeting that one state to get rid of it. Where there is an ounce of freedom, the authoritarian is threatened. We are in the business of preserving ourselves, and if it takes us elsewhere where we are threatened, fine. If we are not willing to defend our own freedom, then it’s not worth very much. Now, there’s a difference in believing as the Founders of our country did, that all people have God-given unalienable rights. The Founders believed that and I believe it. There’s a big difference in believing that and then going around the world and fighting wars to effectuate that outcome around the world because you may not be acting in your own best or national interests in the process.
The Founders did not anoint us as guarantors of worldwide freedom. They established the United States of America as a beacon of and a source of and a location of, but there was nothing in our charter that says in order for us to remain as we are we gotta go out and make sure everybody else is like us, and I do not have that view, and I have never ascribed the use of the military of this country in that way. Now, there are others — and this Egypt thing illustrated it, and the thing in Libya illustrates it — there are some even on our side who believe and this guy, if I woulda stayed with him he would have eventually gotten to it, the neocons. How long did it take, just to illustrate this, when Egypt happened, what was it, five seconds, and there are a bunch of people, “Well, look it’s a freedom uprising,” when they didn’t even know. It wasn’t known what it was. But the desire for it to be was that, so if it was, we had to support it. And that meant getting rid of a well-known ally, Hosni Mubarak. I’ve recounted many times Mubarak, hell, no great shakes about Mubarak, but in that region he happened to be a friend.
So in our calculation, US national interests and a rock solid ally there, Israel, what made more sense? Holding onto this guy, a known product, or throwing that country into turmoil and ending up perhaps with a militant Islamic regime, which looks like it might. Well, that certainly is not in our national interests to do or to have happen, ditto Libya. But what I want to stress here is that none of what I’ve been talking about is even on the table in terms of the calculation of this White House. This White House is calculating what they’re doing in Libya and elsewhere clearly and singularly on “2012 or Bust,” Obama being reelected. Now, this guy also talked about being fallen, you know, that whole concept. Being fallen does not mean that you don’t yearn for freedom. Yearning for freedom as a natural existence of Creation is in and of itself singular.
I happen to believe that a human coming out of the womb, natural yearning is to be free. Now, if from the moment that young baby is born and knows only one thing, oppression and so forth, you know, freedom remains a distant concept, something that they haven’t lived, but I believe it’s in their soul. I believe it’s there, but does it mean that we put the lives and fortunes of the United States on the line in that instance simply for that reason? We don’t. There has to be something far larger than that, because also in this mix is the whole concept of free will, especially as a conservative. This goes back to the whole notion of living side by side with the leftists. They don’t believe in free will. We’re free, that’s intolerable. We are far more tolerant than they are, far more tolerant. They want none of us teaching in their universities, none, zero. They want none of us as governors. They want none of us in their unions, none of us. We don’t have any desire to wipe ’em out. We want to beat ’em. We actually hope to convert ’em.
There’s a break I have to take. Don’t go away.
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RUSH: It’s like asking, “Why do men wear shoes?” It’s a two-part question. Why, we’ve been asking for decades, centuries, forever, why. The quest for knowledge. There’s never any answer to it. Do men wear shoes? Yeah. Simple.
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