RUSH: We go to Green Bay, Wisconsin. This is Chris. Great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Thanks, Rush. Mega dittos from Scott Walker’s Wisconsin.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I was calling because I have a feeling tonight will just be nothing but empty platitudes because the enemy that Obama’s gonna be speaking about is not who he views as his true enemy, and that his true enemy is really the Constitution of this country and the American people. The only time his actions back his words are when he can take it out on the American people, whether it’s Dodd-Frank, Obamacare, you have the border crisis, everything. This speech is gonna be nothing tonight.
RUSH: Well, you know, you may have a point because I have a story here by Major Garrett, CBS White House correspondent: “Why should anyone watch Obama’s ISIS speech?” I think Major’s a little crabby here. “During the White House press briefing Tuesday, CBS correspondent Major Garrett questioned Barack Obama‘s chief spokesman on why anyone should bother to watch the presidentÂ’s upcoming major speech on ISIS. … Garrett said, ‘the audience wants to know how weÂ’re going to win.'”
And a lot of people, that’s really what it boils down to. George Patton (imitating Patton), “Americans love a winner. Americans love to win. We don’t lose.” We expect to win. We expect to win every military conflict we enter. There are some people who have serious concerns that that is what Obama’s interested in. Winning, what would that take?
Some people think this ISIS bunch is the new Nazis and the new Hitler. What would it take to beat these guys? Didn’t Obama say we can’t? Skirmish here, skirmish there, but we’re never gonna be able to wipe ’em out. We’re never gonna be able to eradicate ’em, he said. I remember that. What if we’d had that attitude about the Nazis? That’s right. That’s exactly right.
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RUSH: Okay, in advance of Obama’s speech tonight, let’s go back, shall we? Because that’s true. It was, well, a minimum of two weeks ago where Obama said, of ISIS, that we’re not gonna be able to wipe ’em out. We could eliminate ’em here or there, a skirmish here or there, but we’re never gonna be able to wipe them out.
I was dumbfounded by that because I remember asking you when that happened, “What if we had had that attitude about any of the enemies we’ve had? The Nazis? What if we’d had that attitude about Imperial Japan in World War II, after Pearl Harbor?” It is true. The American people expect to win. By the way, folks, this group, ISIS? They’re here. They are here! They are recruiting in prisons and have been for a while.
They are flooding our wide-open border in the southern parts of the country. There are malcontent Americans who are being pitched and are signing up for ISIS, ditto in Great Britain. They are practicing underwear bombs. They’re practicing shoe bombs. They’re practicing disrupting airplanes. They’re practicing. They’re rehearsing. They’re here!
Dick Cheney’s right. This is serious. The American people expect to win whenever we engage in battle, conflict. There is this real undercurrent of concern that Obama is not focused on winning and said he didn’t think we could wipe ’em out, which leads people to question: Does he want to wipe ’em out? It’s only a natural thing for some people to ask.
Obama did facilitate the Muslim Brotherhood. They were the “moderates.” They were “the good guys.” Obama went over, made the speech in Cairo and everything was gonna be cool. Remember that? We were gonna have a new relationship with the militant Islamists. We were gonna find a way to forge a relationship with moderate Muslims, and they were gonna join us in a massive effort to “minimalize” the radicals and so forth.
The exact opposite has happened.
Our last caller had a point, our last caller from Green Bay had a point. I’ve observed this many times. Wouldn’t it be great if Obama got as mad at people attempting to harm the country as he does at Republicans or conservatives or Tea Party groups or what have you? But I don’t think that there’s any question that… Let me put it this way. It’s not that difficult when you listen to…
It’s not just Obama. It could be John Kerry, it could be Hillary, it could be any number of Democrats. When they start talking about the Tea Party or conservatives, they get animated, and it is sheer disgust, and they do not disguise it. But they do not talk of our real enemies that way, ’cause we don’t want to make them mad. “No, no, no, no! We’re gonna appease ’em. We’re gonna show them we mean them no harm!”
See, Obama believes that one of the reasons they hate us is that they’re justified in hating us because of our allied relationship with Israeli, or because of our superpower status. They really do believe that we have created poverty all over the world by virtue of our superpower status and theft. So there’s a part of these leftists that think now, we’re responsible for this.
I don’t know it goes so far as to say we deserve it, but when you say that we’re responsible, okay, well, you know, we’ve gotta expect some of this stuff. I mean, we’re responsible for making them mad. If you think that’s odd, I take you back to 9/11 and within a month of 9/11 the State Department’s convening a panel discussion on: What did we do to anger them? Why don’t they like us? Meaning Al-Qaeda.
So the left is always gonna blame America. They always have blamed America. But at the same time, they really believe that with Obama, now we got somebody who can relate to ’em, talk to ’em, and talk ’em down and convince them we no longer mean them any harm. That, of course, was silly and it’s blown up in their face.
And if you happen to have a messianic complex and actually believe that just your life, your presence, your existence can end evil and bad guys, well, when it doesn’t, what kind of shellshock are you in? Then you might enter a state of denial. So now we’re in a situation. Obama’s gonna go out and make a speech tonight that he probably really doesn’t believe in.
Because in his off moments when he’s not guarded, he’ll tell us what he really thinks. “Well, I don’t think that we can beat them. Well, we’ll have a skirmish here, skirmish there we can take care of but I don’t think we can permanently eliminate them. I don’t have a strategy. I really don’t.” So now we got a speech tonight where all that’s gone and now Obama reeeeally cares. But the other side, the American people expect to win, and there are some doubts.
Now, Obama hasn’t said this yet, but what if we hear something like this tonight: “I make the following pledge: No boots on the ground, no civilian casualties, an attorney for anyone captured. We won’t fire first.” This has been our foreign policy. We’re treating all of this as crimes. What did Holder do? We launched a criminal investigation into some terrorist the other day.
This was the week before I left on much-needed vacation. There was some dastardly terrorism. Oh, it was the beheading! Yes, we launched a criminal investigation. That’s exactly that’s what we did. We’re gonna indict whoever beheaded the two journalists, if we can find out who did it. We’re not treating it as an act of war, and this is not exclusive to Obama. This goes back to the Clinton years.
Remember what Robert Gates wrote about Obama in his book? Robert Gates was defense secretary for George W. Bush, and he was held over, served as defense secretary for Obama for a while. “By early 2010 he [Gates] had concluded the president ‘doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his.'” That’s quite telling. This is Gates. He was there.
He was defense secretary. In his book, he wrote that by 2010 — this is just three years ago — Gates had concluded that Obama didn’t even believe in his own strategy and didn’t think the war was his. It was Bush’s. So is all this. I guarantee you. All of this — in Obama’s mind, the Democrats’ minds, the media — is Bush failing to finish the job. Never mind that Obama proclaimed victory and proclaimed the job is finished and took credit for finishing it.
What’s gonna happen here is that this is all necessary ’cause of Bush. “Bush didn’t finish it. Bush angered the Muslim community. Bush is a cowboy Bush for going into Iraq when it wasn’t necessary and we’re paying a price.” That’s what a lot of people expect the line to be. “Gates offers a catalogue of various meetings, based in part on notes that he and his aides made at the time, including an exchange between Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that he calls ‘remarkable.’
“He writes: ‘Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. … The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.'”
I’m sure it was dismaying. Why can’t everybody see…?
I get so frustrated. I must admit, I get frustrated. (sigh) Why are we, folks — you and me, why are we — the only ones that see the political angle in everything Obama or Hillary or the modern day Democrat Party does? Here’s Gates, he’s a defense secretary. This is this is remarkable. Hillary and Obama are sitting around chatting with each other, and Hillary tells Obama, “I opposed the surge in 2007.”
That’s Bush.
“I opposed it for political reasons because I had to deal with you , Obama, in the Iowa primary to try to get to the left. I couldn’t appear to be a war hawk. I couldn’t appear to be a warmonger or a hawk, because you’re running as a dove, and I had to move left.” And then Obama said that his opposition to the Iraq surge had been political, too! Yet these two people want us to believe they’re some of the greatest statesmen that we’ve ever had.
Everything is a political calculation, and this speech tonight is. They’re not alone, don’t misunderstand. But they’re given credit for things of much loftier, and they’re not. They don’t deserve that credit. They’re not great statesmen. They are political calculators. Everything is PR, buzz, image, whatever, I think in large part because they know in their hearts that what they believe is not in the majority of the thinking in this country, particularly when it comes to military matters and national security.
Most Americans don’t blame ourselves. Most Americans don’t think we are responsible for Al-Qaeda existing, nor ISIS, nor Saddam Hussein, nor Iran. We don’t think we’re to blame for it. We don’t blame our relationship with Israel for it. These people do. They know they’re never gonna go very far politically saying that, so they calculate what they need to do politically to get the support of their kook-fringe base, and they rely on the media to create images of great seriousness and statesmanship, intelligence and foresight and all this gunk that they don’t possess in reality. And eventually they run full speed into reality, which is what is happening to Obama now.
Mr. Buzz, Mr. PR, Mr. Political calculation has run flat up against reality, and the reality is his presence doesn’t mean a diddly-squat thing to these people. And the reality is that his presence makes, in their minds, their job even easier, because the reality that he’s run up against is that they realize he’s an appeaser. Even if you don’t have a strategy, why in the name of Sam Hill say so publicly after a beheading of an American journalist.
So this is the guy who made a political calculation, admitted to Hillary, made a political calculation about supporting the surge. While Hillary admits the same thing to him, this is the guy who’s gonna address the nation about ISIS. A commander-in-chief willing to send America’s best into harm’s way for political reasons, or to keep them out of a necessary fight if need be for political reasons, his political needs. It should be a heck of a speech, folks, a heck of a speech.