RUSH: I have a question, ladies and gentlemen. You go to the National Prayer Breakfast, and you’re president of the United States. You go to the National Prayer Breakfast, today — the National Prayer Breakfast! There are, in attendance, thousands of Christians of one denomination or another. Fundamentalists, evangelicals, Protestants, Catholics, the whole gamut. Why would you insult them? Why would you attempt to downplay militant Islam.

Why would you attempt to downplay Islamist extremism? Why would you attempt to put in perspective the actions being taken today by Al-Qaeda and ISIS and Boko Haram and the Khorasan Group and all of the rest of them by claiming that just as many atrocities have taken place in the name of Christ? Why in the world would you make that point? Why in the world would you even be thinking that way?

Why in the world, when you are going to the National Prayer Breakfast, would your number one focus point be to insult the attendees? What in the world must have gone through Obama’s head? “At the National Prayer Breakfast today, President Obama reminded attendees that violence rooted in religion is not exclusive to Islam, but it has been carried out by Christians as well.” Let’s go to the audio sound bites. We have three. Here’s the first.

OBAMA: We have seen violence and terror perpetrated by those who profess to stand up for faith, their faith. Professed to stand up for Islam, but in fact are betraying it. Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is (pause) unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow, all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

RUSH: Now, look, folks, Christianity is not the problem today. Jim Crow’s not around today. A thousand years ago, yeah. But not today. Sharia law is the present day threat to individual and civil liberties all over the world. Sharia is not a narrow cult. Sharia law is Islam. The problem today is not Christianity. The problem today is that people are being killed, captured, conquered to advance and impose Sharia law. The Christians are doing no such thing, and haven’t I don’t know if ever, on this scale, and for how long.

I don’t know of a single Christian leader today who takes the past and uses it as an excuse to blast Christians today. Why in the world would that even be on your mind. And not just that, why would that be among the top of the things on your mind? What is this business about “lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place”? High horse? Who among us is running around here on our high horse, if not for the president of the United States?

Who is it, among all of us in this country, who doesn’t seem to realize or want to admit the great threat that we all face today? It’s not a thousand years ago! Who is it that simply doesn’t want to be or can’t be honest about the modern day, about the present day? Why in the world is this even on his mind? Why show up and know that this is going to be taken as an insult. I have long believed — and I’ve shared with you this belief — that this man is not at all who everybody thought he was in 2008.

We’ve even got Andrew Young at the prayer breakfast today. He said the world has never been in this bad shape. Has the world ever been in this bad shape? Take you back 2008 in that campaign and remember what we were all told about the Obama candidacy and a potential Obama presidency, and that is what? Do you remember, folks? If one word will suffice, it was “unity.” We were all gonna be unified!

Finally we were gonna get rid of these base disagreements, large and small. The world was once again going to love the United States of America. We had successfully vanquished the irresponsible cowboy, George W. Bush, and his henchmen, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Yes, we’d finally sent them out to the great pasture in the sky, and now here came a man unlike any America had ever seen — entering the political world, unlike that world had ever seen.

We were going to end climate change! The sea levels were going to stop rising preponderate (not that they ever were). This man was given the Nobel Peace Prize before he had his first dinner in the White House, and look at the world today. The world was going to love us. We were no longer going to have any racial strife in America. We were not gonna have any strife, because we were now going to have a new kind of politics, where there were no blue states and there were no red states and there were no Republicans and there were no Democrats.

There were just us, all finally unified and together in a single purpose.

That single purpose being unity and love for each other and for the world. We’re gonna close Club Gitmo, we’re gonna stop torturing people, we’re gonna stop taking prisoners, we’re gonna stop this ceaseless march of the United States as a superpower all over the world. We were going to finally recognize our place in the world, and that place in the world is not as a superpower but just one of any number of other hundreds of nations.

There was no longer going to be anything special about us.

Well, how did work out for everybody? How is all that unity? I see it every day, don’t you? Where is all this love around the world for the United States, and how about all that racial strife that’s come to a screeching halt? You seen the new weapons in Ferguson, Missouri? Yeah, what would you actually call those things? They’re like ping-pong balls with bullets in there, right? Or some such thing. I mean.. (interruption) Stun gun-type thing, yeah.

Whatever people thought it was gonna be, we’re not even close to it. In fact we’ve gotten worse. The world is in more debt today than during the financial crisis, which in part launched Obama to the White House, because that gave he need the impression that the economy was tanking fast. We need new action, new thinking. What instead do we really get? I think this National Prayer Breakfast kind of dots the I, crosses the T on all this. We have a guy, we have a man who really has a problem with this country.

He has a problem with this nation’s founding. He has a deep-seated problem with this nation’s existence. He doesn’t like the fact that we’re a superpower, thinks it’s not been honestly earned. We’re cheaters and we’re thieves. We are rich beyond the rest of the world’s comprehension, not because we’ve had a unique way of creating wealth and prosperity. No, no, no, no! We’ve run around the world and we’ve stolen things from other people. We’ve stolen cultural things; we’ve stolen resources; we’ve stolen money.

In fact, there’s nothing special about the US.

The US was founded as a racist, slave, bigoted nation, and we still haven’t paid the price for that as far as he’s concerned. Why on earth would you go to the National Prayer Breakfast with thousands of Christians from across the spectrum and insult them? And at the same time, try to downplay the present day threat? And not just downplay it, but to try to put it in some sort of context as, “Hey, nothing unique here! Been there, done that. You Christians did just the same kind of stuff back in the days of the Crusades!

“Let’s not get on our high horse, here. In the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. There’s nothing special here to see!” Except that the problem today is not Christianity. The problem today is that people are being killed and captured and conquered to advance and impose Sharia law, which is militant Islam. I don’t know of a Christian leader today who takes the past and uses it as an excuse to blast Christians or Jews or Muslims or Hindus, you name it.

But this guy does. And it’s the same with the Constitution.

Find some alleged past sin and use it as a blunt instrument against any and all progress. “The Constitution’s irrelevant anyway. The Constitution’s invalid anyway. It was written by and voted on by a bunch of slave-owning, racist pigs! Screw it!” That’s his attitude. There is no absolution with this man. Ferguson isn’t Selma, but it may as well be. Christianity isn’t Sharia, never was. Until today. Today Ferguson is Selma, and Christianity is Sharia. Just separated by a thousand years.

That’s another thing, too: Taking shots at Christianity’s past asks people to take their eyes off the ball today. Whether people are being shot, imprisoned, flogged, beheaded, or burned alive, it’s not the only problem. How Sharia law is achieved is noteworthy, but it’s not the end all. Obama’s actively working with Iran, which has promised to wipe Israel off the map. The latest from Iran is that US negotiators are begging Iran for a deal. Now, before you discount it and say, “Come on, Rush, you can’t believe it.

“It’s the Iranians,” I remember the 2012 presidential campaign, and there he was, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, running around ripping the United States of America, ripping Mitt Romney, and it sounded just like anyway Democrat on the campaign trail. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad described his grievances with America, they sounded identical to what I hear from Dick Durbin’s mouth, what I heard from Obama, what I hear from John Kerry, from the Drive-By Media, you name it.

So if the Iranians are out saying, “The US is begging us for a deal,” why in the world would that be? I mean, what’s the point of that? Unless Obama desperately wants in the resume the statement that the United States and Iran came to a mutually agreed deal on nuclear weapons, much like Obama and the president who finally, after all of these years of sacrifice and desire, delivered socialized national health care. Obama is actively working with Hamas, as he is working with Iran.

Hamas has pledged to annihilate the Jewish state. Obama has actively backed the Muslim Brotherhood, an umbrella group for virtually every Al-Qaeda related terrorist group out there. To minimize the horrors — which is what he did today. To minimize the horrors of present day Islamic extremists and try to excuse them by saying, “Hey, it’s nothing new! You Christians did the same thing…a thousand years ago.” That’s bizarre, folks. Moral relativism from 500 to a thousand years ago?

But Christianity is not on trial today. The president is directly and indirectly promoting religious beliefs that are hostile to Western values. Women’s rights, gay rights, the rights of Jews, they’re under assault today in all the places the president seems to want to make excuses for. The reason ISIS, Iran, Hamas, and the other terror groups are growing in strength is because the president left Iraq faster than Bill Cosby can slip a roofie into a woman’s drink, apparently.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay, got some smart alecks in the e-mail. Let me just be clear: I’m not denying Crusades took place, not at all. But the last I looked — feel free to correct me on this, nattering nabobs, if you wish — but Christianity had a reformation. If I’m not mistaken. And even if Obama is correct that the Crusaders killed in the name of Christ. They didn’t do it consistent with the “love one another” doctrine of the New Testament!

But when Islamic terrorists kill, they constantly cite scripture as their reason for doing so. But wait a minute. Wait a minute. Why make the comparison anyway? Because Obama says that ISIS isn’t Islamic. Obama says ISIS is not Muslim, so why even make the comparison today at the National Prayer Breakfast? Here’s another sound bite from the president at that breakfast today.

OBAMA: I believe that the starting point of faith is some doubt, not bein’ so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and th-that God speaks only to us and doesn’t speak to others, that God only cares about us and doesn’t care about others —

RUSH: Who thinks that?

OBAMA: — that somehow we alone are in possession of the truth. Our job is not to ask that God respond to our notion of truth. Our job is to be true to Him, Hi-His word and His commandments, and we should assume humbly that we’re confused and don’t always know what we’re doin’ and we’re staggerin’ and stumblin’ towards him and have some humility in that process.

RUSH: All right, so now we’re gonna be lectured on humility, see? Somehow we’re all to blame because we haven’t been humble enough. I don’t know what is this business that you can’t be so full of yourself and so confident you’re right, God speaks only to us, doesn’t speak to others, God only cares about us? This is the politicization of religious views. We’re getting a guy, a president giving us his political take, his political opinion and analysis of Christianity. Stunning.

Well, it’s not stunning to those of us who know. But it’s still stunning to hear it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: So if you’re out there and you’re trying to figure out President Obama, let me just have you remember one thing: Where did President Obama attend church? He attended the cathedral of the Right Reverend Jeremiah Wright, ladies and gentlemen, of (impression) “America’s chickenssssss have come home to roost” fame. He has to go back a thousand years! Stop and think of this now.

At the National Prayer Breakfast today, President Obama has to go back 1,000 years, 10 centuries, in order to find any examples that might serve to blunt the impact of militant Islam today. He would love to be able to go back to the Reagan years to find examples, but he can’t. He’d love to be able to go back to the Bush years, but Abu Ghraib doesn’t quite do it, and Guantanamo Bay doesn’t quite do it. He’d love to be able to go back to World War II and say, “Hey, you know, as recently as World War II, this country was XYZ.”

But nope, folks, he had to go back 1,000 years to find what he thinks is commensurate and equal behavior, which has but one purpose. The citing of that behavior a thousand years ago is supposed tell us that what’s happening today, “Hey, get off your high horse! This isn’t anything new. This is no big deal.” Here’s the Andrew Young sound bite, also at the National Prayer Breakfast today.

YOUNG: This morning I woke up to the hearings of the Senate committee on your new appointment as secretary of defense, and as they went around talking about all of the dangers and problems that he must confront and that you must face every day, I realize, that’s why we need prayer. And I wondered: Has the world ever been in this bad a shape?

RUSH: Well, you know, everybody, in their day, thinks things have never been worse. That is, I think, a psychological fact that you can find in every generation: People who think they’re, A, in the last days, or who think it’s never been worse. “My God, things are going to hell in a handbasket,” they say. You can always find examples in the past that are worse. But that’s not the way to look at it. Again, the way to look at it is why did people elect Barack Hussein O in 2008?

It was to make sure this kind of stuff never happened again because that was the pledge. That was the promise, and if it was not a direct promise made by the campaign, it was clearly a desire on the part of many millions of Americans — who were led to believe, indirectly, directly, however — that his presidency would mean the end to all of this and a renewed sense of love and hope and faith and goodness and good times and wealth and prosperity. None of it has happened.

Yet millions were not disabused of that notion.

People who thought the election of Obama was going to be the end of strife and the end of disagreement, the end of arguments, the end of confrontation, the end of gridlock, they were not disabused of that program except here, on this program. There were many elected Barack Obama on the sincere hope and in the sincere belief that doing so would tell the world that we have shed our racist past. “The very act electing a black man to the highest office in the land proves we are no longer tied to slavery!”

Yet not even that has seen any improvement. Racial relations in America are worse than they were seven years ago. Everything is! Andrew Young just admitted it. I’ll take a couple of phone calls on this. Let’s take some calls. Let’s stay on the subject for just a minute. Up first is Andy in Des Moines, Iowa. I’m glad you called, Andy. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Mr. Limbaugh, what an honor. My I first say hi to my father-in-law Jim Kay. He’s gonna be just tickled to death to know that I got through to you.

RUSH: (chuckles) Well, thank you very much. I hope you enjoy the experience.

CALLER: Yes, well… (chuckles) I’m a first-time caller. I’ve listened to you for me years. But like Snerdley said get to the point so here it is. Anyways, folks always talk about how bad the Crusaders were and how terrible Christianity was. I wonder if people would realize how different our world would look today had the Crusades not been put together by, you know, the first one was by I believe Pope Clement. If Islam, if militant Islam had spread across Europe, had the Crusades not happened, how much different this world would look today?

RUSH: Wait a minute now. Wait just a second. I want to make sure I understand what you are saying. Are you suggesting, sir, that the Crusades started as a way of stopping the spread of radical Islam across Europe?

CALLER: That is my assertation. (sic) I’ve done a lot of reading on it, read very many different books on it.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: That is generally the idea there, is that militant Islam was spreading.

RUSH: Okay, it may be historically true. You believe that the Crusades were actually begun as a means of stopping the rapid spread of militant Islam all across Europe. Factor that in now to Obama’s comments (chuckles) today at the National Prayer Breakfast where he attempts to downplay ISIS, downplay militant Islam, downplay Al-Qaeda. “Hey! Hey, hey, you guys!” He’s looking at the audience. He may as well have said to the Christians, “You guys, you did the same thing a thousand years ago.”

CALLER: Exactly. You know, and that’s the thing I guess there was a battle of Lepanto, Lepanto, however you want to pronounce it there. But that battle, there’s a major sea battle that took place, and what was the impetus for that was a horrible, horrible butchering of Christian soldiers in a city that basically held out for a long time.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: It took the leader of that, after he surrendered his army, they took it and they skinned him alive — militant Muslims now. They skinned this guy alive and made an effigy out of his stuffed body then, and used that as kind of a banner to carry into battle, and it so infuriated, I believe it was the Venetians, that they basically had a call to arms and it was the greatest naval defeat ever handed to the Muslims.

RUSH: In more recent days, more recent times, Thomas Jefferson warned ’em of the same thing, when talking about the Barbary Prates. Do you know, Mr. Snerdley, how livid the ill-educated…? I don’t think there are too many in this audience, but there are some. Libs tune in here every day, and you know they don’t know half what they think they know. Can you imagine how they react to a call like that? “Well, the reason for the Crusades is exactly what’s going on now! They had to stop the spread of militant Islam!” That’s just not gonna sit well, and I’m sure they don’t know that because they’ve been told everything about the Crusades other than the enemy. You know that’s the case. Anyway, Andy, I appreciate the call.

Here’s Devon in North Carolina. Great to have you, sir, with us on the EIB Network. Hi.

CALLER: Afternoon, Rush. How are you?

RUSH: If I’m fine and dandy, so far. Things are looking good for the balance of the day.

CALLER: Absolutely. I just wanted to comment on the fact that the Crusades only happened because of one man’s 30-year trek from kingdom to kingdom between 1065 and 1095, because the average pilgrim that would go to Jerusalem would have ended up getting killed or they’d levy taxes on all of them, so that only one in four actually made it to Jerusalem and back. And that’s the only reason did. Even when we did, we gathered up our military and fought another military. We did not go around killing innocent people.

RUSH: So you’re saying —

CALLER: To call it act of barbarism is completely wrong.

RUSH: It is your assertion the Crusades were a defensive maneuver?

CALLER: Absolutely.

RUSH: And in response to the wanton murder of Christians by militant Islamists back then a thousand years ago?

CALLER: Precisely. And the first thing we did was build hospitals. We did not go in and start slaughtering people. We built hospitals to house the pilgrims and keep them going.

RUSH: See, you’re the exact kind of guy Obama’s talking about. You’re on your high horse! You think you got all the answers, and you don’t think God listens to anybody but you. You’re the exact kind of guy that Obama was talking about today.

CALLER: Not at all.

RUSH: I’m teasing! But you are. You are.

CALLER: (chuckles) I know.

RUSH: It’s just a convenient fact of the Crusades that Obama left out.

CALLER: Precisely.

RUSH: I’m just asking the question, but beyond all that, I’m just asking the question: Why, of all places and at all times, at the National Prayer Breakfast, come up with a way of speaking, praying, whatever, that is going to insult the thousands of attendees? Why would you do that? Oh, there’s no question… Folks, in answering my hypothesis, my question here, you understand the thousands of attendees at the National Prayer Breakfast were not the audience for Obama’s comments today. Oh, you might have been there, and you might have been seated there, and you might have seen Obama, and you might have heard him speak, but you were not to whom he was speaking, if that helps you understand what really happened today.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: And, by the way, it’s just as relevant that Obama had to throw in Jim Crow and slavery into all of this. Folks, let me tell you something. There’s a good… You know, I make a big point on this program of telling you: Where does this stuff find its way into the mainstream of popular culture, popular belief? This kind of stuff that you heard Obama say today is typical of what students on campus are learning at most of your major and junior universities out there today.

This guy is just a simple radical — a modern-day, classic radical — just like the professors that have tenure at all these universities, and this is the kind of drivel that students hear all the time. It’s just we’ve elected one of these guys. We simply have elected one now — although unbeknownst to most people.