RUSH: It’s fascinating out there, ladies and gentlemen, to watch the Drive-By Media continue to run the risk of dying from anal poisoning. They continue to salivate as disciples over Obama. By the way, if you’ve checked your newspaper today, I guarantee you there’s probably a large picture of Obama taken from behind him showing the massive throng in front of the Victory Column. This is what will be remembered. Nobody’s going to remember the speech, the words of this speech. They probably don’t remember it now other than the line he apparently stole from Bono: ‘This is our moment. This is our time.’ Bono made that statement some years ago. This is not Obama’s at all. He didn’t steal it from himself. He lifted it from a concert appearance, I think, or a TV appearance by Bono. But that’s the photo op that they want and they got the photo and people are going to remember that picture. They are not going to remember his words, because they weren’t memorable. Even most in the audience couldn’t tell you what he said. That’s not why they were there. But while all this is going on and the Drive-Bys are proclaiming that it’s just a huge win, it’s out of the park, it’s over wall, it’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to politics for Obama, something strange has happened. McCain’s caught him in the polls.
The Daily Gallup Tracking Poll is a dead heat for all intents and purposes. Fox News Opinion Dynamics, a couple of other polls, McCain’s caught up, and in swing states to boot. This has been a horrible week for McCain, say the Drive-Bys. There’s a backlash going on out there, a backlash that I, ladies and gentlemen, predicted to you earlier in this busy broadcast week. There is a backlash against the Drive-By Media. There’s a backlash going on against the presumptuousness of Obama and his campaign. So this great week for Obama and lousy week for McCain, according to the media narrative, has led to a tied race. Can there be a greater disconnect?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Slowly but surely, ladies and gentlemen, it is dawning on many of the disciples — slowly but surely dawning on many of the disciples following around The Messiah, the Lord Barack Obama — that they are just common people to him, that they are not special to him like they want to be. Adam Nagourney of the New York Times was treated like an opposing candidate by the Obama campaign. Remember the story in the New York Times last week? I remember heralding this story, and calling it to your attention. ‘Obama Not Closing the Racial Divide.’ My eyes got wide open on that because this was not typical. Here you had an Obama house organ, the New York Times — house organ for the Obama campaign in the Democrat Party — and they wrote a piece and it was a long piece, about how Obama’s not bridging any racial divide. Eighty-nine to 90% of the black vote’s going to go for him.
There’s no unification going on. The Obama campaign did not like that. I think they called just very briefly Nagourney to talk about it, but when he woke up the next day, they had released a huge long talking point memo refuting everything in Nagourney’s story, which made him livid because he was being treated just like an opposing candidate; and he got mad that Obama and the Obama campaign would not call him personally to discuss all this. And so even liberal reporters, even the disciples, must learn not to mess with The Messiah. This is going to be fascinating to watch all this stuff fall out. I mentioned earlier, this isn’t the best thing for Obama. I’m sensing a lot of Obama fatigue, ladies and gentlemen. Fortunately, there are some things here that I am compelled to comment upon today as the program unfolds about Obama. I think there’s some severe Obama fatigue happening.
The best thing he could do is go away for a couple of months. He’s going to wear everybody out. We haven’t even gotten to the conventions yet. We’re two months away — well, a month, month away — from the convention and all of this overkill, I think, is going to be wearing people out. People’s emotional reservoirs are only so large, can only hold so much. And after a while you can’t keep that emotional fervor up. At that speech yesterday in Germany, wasn’t any fainting, there wasn’t any euphoria. And, in fact, you want to talk to some of the people on the street, it didn’t meet their expectations. They were expecting this big rock star, the greatest speechmaker they’ve ever heard and it was sort of a dullard and dry speech. It was very short by Obama standards. That’s not what they care about at the Obama campaign. They got the pictures. That’s what people will remember.
The one phrase they might remember from his speech is, ‘This is our moment. This is our time. This is our chance’ to do whatever. These words were uttered by the front man for U2, Bono, in the July, 2005 Live 8 concert. So Obama’s speechwriter — and, by the way, we don’t expect Obama to write all these speeches. These guys don’t write all their speeches. We expect the speechwriter to understand some various things, and we’ve got some examples in the stack today of some things he said in his speech yesterday that were totally factually wrong about Belfast, for example. The walls are still up in Belfast. In fact, they’ve gotten longer and bigger. He said they’ve come down. It’s ignorance. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t think. Whatever is put in front of him is what he says, what he believes and what he reads. Go to the audio sound bites just to give you a taste here. Jake Tapper last night on ABC’s World News Tonight with Charles Gibson, here is a portion of the exchange as Tapper was talking to people in the crowd.
TAPPER: And as for the people who came here today, many of them gushed about his speech.
GERMAN: I think, uh, he’s the new president for America.
TAPPER: And as if that weren’t glowing enough…
BRIT: I thought it was brilliant. He’s my new Messiah.
RUSH: There you go: ‘It was brilliant. He’s my new Messiah.’ So the term coined here on EIB Network has made it across the pond. The National Barack Channel last night right after Obama delivered the speech, Brian Williams walking off the stage with him.
WILLIAMS: When an American politician comes to Berlin, we’ve had some iconic utterances in the past.
OBAMA: Right.
WILLIAMS: We’ve had ‘Ich bin ein;’ we’ve had, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’
OBAMA: Well, I — I — I — I — I don’t — I don’t rate, uh — I don’t rate that high. The, uh —
WILLIAMS: Is the phraseology that you would like remembered: ‘People of Berlin, people of the world: This is our moment; this is our time’?
OBAMA: You know, I think that that captures, uhhh, what I was trying to communicate.
RUSH: Yeah? (laughing) Listen, they are not your words, Barry, ‘This is our moment; this is our time.’ Those words were first uttered (in this kind of context, anyway) by Bono of U2 back in July of 2005. I’ve got bites here how Obama’s been using this phrase. We go back here to June the 3rd. It’s all over the place. He’s just plagiarizing himself here. Let’s move to sound bite number 8 because I saw this last night and I asked Cookie, I said, ‘Get me this sound bite.’ This is on The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer and he was speaking with Christiane Amanpour. And he said, ‘Do you get a sense, Christiane, that he actually delivered with his presentation, with his speech, with his appearance in Berlin? Did people walk away seemingly satisfied or disappointed?’
AMANPOUR: I’m not sure they were thoroughly satisfied. I did ask some people when they were leaving and they said, ‘Good, good.’ But I was surprised there wasn’t this sort of euphoria afterwards given how many people had come to listen and how much it had been anticipated.
RUSH: See, that’s another thing. How many people showed up actually with great and high expectations, or was this just a party? I mean, these are young Germans on a summer night. The beer is flowing; the bratwursts and the whatever else is being served out there. They had a rock concert. They had two concerts before this that the media’s not reporting, free concerts to help draw the crowd. I mean, this was just the latest celebrity showing up with a bunch of people showing up to say they were there. The remarks were not memorable and nobody is going to remember them because they’re not memorable. Nobody’s going to be able to recall them. This is a strict photo-op and so the Drive-By Media and Christiane Amanpour letting the cat out of the bag: ‘I didn’t see any euphoria.’ Well, there’s nothing to be euphoric about in these remarks. Candy Crawley was on CNN’s Elections Center with Campbell Brown last night. This is a quick bite. It runs three seconds. Campbell Brown says, ‘Give us a sense of the reaction there to Obama’s speech.’
CRAWLEY: I wouldn’t say it was wild.
RUSH: ‘I… I… I… I…’Do you know how pained she was on saying that? ‘I… I… I… I… wouldn’t say it was wild.’ Oh, slap me! Did I say it wasn’t wild? It was not the reaction everybody thought they were going to get, but that doesn’t matter because they can make it up and say there was that reaction.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Obama’s doing a joint press conference now with Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, and here’s pretty much what Obama’s saying.
OBAMA: I also want to thank the, uh, uh, the, uh, this us, eh, uh, you know, uh, is, uh, uh —
RUSH: I kid you not. It’s so bad that the camera did a close-up on his right hand gesturing as he’s speaking so nobody would see his mouth open, uh, uh, uh.
OBAMA: I called, and I’m, uh, with, uh, as, uh, that, uh, and we have to do this, uh, as well as I, uh, uh, I, uh, uh —
RUSH: All right, that’s enough. Fade it down. Folks, it’s seven minutes, 34 seconds. Not one of these uhs was duplicated from his Amman, Jordan press conference earlier in the week. We took all of those that we could find in that 40 minute press conference and banged them together. The Drive-By Media is trying to persuade us that Obama’s presidency is inevitable now despite the polls showing him in a relatively poor position, given the electoral environment. He got no bump. In fact, McCain’s getting a bump. If anybody’s getting a bump, it’s McCain out of this. Obama is losing ground during this week in this trip. And despite that, despite the polls showing Obama in a relatively poor position, they act, the Drive-Bys, the disciples, like he’s the president. They like the fact that he’s acting like the president, traveling the world like a president, putting together a transition team and so forth. So he’s the presumptive inevitable president and they want us to get used to it. McCain to them now is an annoyance.
There is a piece, I’ve debated all day whether to read this. There is a fabulous piece, I found this last night at the UK Times online by Gerard Baker, and it is a review of Obama to this point. (interruption) Well, because it’s very long. It’s one of these things, I read this I said, ‘Damn, I wish I had written it.’ You want the headline? ”He Ventured Forth to Bring Light to the World’ — The anointed one’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land is a miracle in action — and a blessing to all his faithful followers.’ You heard, by the way, that he stopped in Bethlehem to check the place he was born. He didn’t take any press there. He didn’t want to disturb the animals. By the way, he canceled two appearances yesterday with the troops in Germany and you know what the excuse now is? Now, this is the kind of thing to me, this matters. (interruption) Well, yeah, he blamed it on the Pentagon but, see, this is the kind of stuff that matters to me.
See, I think character, whether somebody’s telling you the truth about things matters. That way if you size up somebody as a BS artist or as a liar and you elect them, then you get what you deserve and you should never express surprise. Like, I for one, am not surprised Edwards did what he did because I think Edwards has been a charlatan and a phony-baloney con man since the beginning of politics after he left law. So none of that Edwards story surprises me. None of what Bill Clinton does surprises me. But even the Drive-Bys started dumping on Clinton during the Obama/Hillary campaign. No, what the Obama camp is saying is that they, out of respect for the military, canceled because they thought it would be improper for a paid-for campaign event to go visit the troops, that it would be demeaning to the troops to appear as a campaign event. The Pentagon said you can come, but you can’t bring the media circus and you can’t bring the cameras. When the Pentagon said you can’t bring the cameras, that’s when the Obama people said they’re not going. Then they tried to lay this off on the Pentagon, but the bottom line is they were not allowed to bring cameras and that’s why they canceled it.
But here’s the thing. Obama started his speech yesterday saying he was not a candidate, remember? He was just a guy walking through the woods there and he sees 100,000 people or more, a microphone and a podium and says, ‘Hey, I think I’ll go give a speech.’ He stands up and says, ‘I am not a candidate. I’m a citizen of the world,’ or whatever. Cancels the trip to the troops because it would be a campaign event. Now, how can a non-candidate be engaging in a campaign event? See, these are little things, folks, to most people, ‘Oh, Rush.’ They matter. He could still go. In fact, the wise thing to have done would have been to go see them with nobody knowing he had done it and then announce that he had done it after he was gone, and then go to the Ritz-Carlton to work out. That would have been the smart thing to do. But he makes it obvious he didn’t care about seeing the troops. He wanted a photo op. And when they told him he couldn’t take any photogs and the reason you can’t take photographers is because the Pentagon has a rule that the military can’t get involved in campaigns and so that’s why you couldn’t take photographers. Obama could have gone in there as a private citizen without cameras. They said he could take a couple, three aides, no media and no pictures, that he could have gone in, and he didn’t.
Now, a lot of people here say, ‘It’s not a big deal, Rush, he had a busy schedule.’ This is the little stuff that I notice that sends up huge red flags about somebody’s character. I was telling Snerdley when we walked out of here yesterday, when he made this remark — the thing that I will never forget — see, I’m going to remember a lot about that speech yesterday. When he trashed his own country, when he focused on our imperfections and he said we’ve got a lot of explaining to do and we’re torturers, where the real torturers are ignored and not condemned, China, Cuba, Africa, Russia, Middle East and we get called out for torture? I mean, I’m not going to forget that. I’m not going to be cowed, ‘But Rush, he cares about people.’ No, I don’t care. The guy is ideologically wrong and he is insincere and you can’t trust the fact that he cares because there are too many things that come out of his mouth that are contradictory that I would say are obfuscations — prevarications for those of you in Rio Linda. He’s lying, and this troop visit in Germany is a classic illustration, the same thing with trashing his own country. I won’t forget that.
Now, why is that important? Some people say, ‘Ah Rush, he’s just trying to appeal to his base.’ This is why associations matter. Who does he know that thinks the same way about America as he spoke it yesterday? Well, Jeremiah Wright, his wife Michelle (My Belle) Obama, Jeremiah Wright’s replacement, this Otis Moss guy, William Ayers, his college professors, ACORN, the community activism or organizing work that he did. My point is that his experience has been around and he’s a learner, not a thinker, has been around people who have the same view of America that he articulated yesterday to the Germans. He threw in one little paragraph in how positive he was or how much he loved his country, but that was just to save a little face after he had gotten through throwing America overboard, to a bunch of German kids. He even got the Berlin airlift wrong. He said the weather was so bad, a bunch of pilots turned back. He insulted the Air Force. I don’t know if he intended to, but there weren’t that many planes that turned back. The Air Force doesn’t launch airplanes into inclement weather that can’t land. He got so many factual things wrong. Belfast, the walls are not down in Belfast. They’re still there! These things matter to me. We’re talking here about the presidency of the United States.
I don’t care what his image is. I don’t care that he sounds smart. I know he’s not. He may have the ability to learn things, but it’s what he’s learned that’s scary. I don’t think he’s a thinker. When he’s doing these press conferences, when he’s doing these joint photo ops, like now with Sarkozy, the uhs and the ahs, he’s wandering in vain for coherent thought because he’s not a thinker. Contrast this, if you will, ladies and gentlemen. Take any typical Obama speech. The speech he gave yesterday in Germany, the speech he gave after securing the nomination up in Minnesota, soaring, uplifting, they say. Do you hear any of the language in his speeches when he is making appearances before the press or like this with Sarkozy? Do you hear the same energy? You don’t. Those speeches are written for him, and we know they are, David Axelrod and some others. He just absorbs it and they give him talking points before the press conferences and he goes out and stays consistent with them, like how he’s explaining that he wouldn’t change his opinion on the surge, even now after he knows that it’s worked. So these little things, they all add up and they give you a great view into the character of somebody. You add to that he is apparently very willing and very much enjoys soaking up this image as The Messiah. He likes it. He likes being portrayed this way. He cultivates it. That’s a character flaw. That’s a personality thing that is dangerous, folks. No humility, or very little, humility in short supply.
Anyway, got to take a brief break. But the piece that this guy in the U.K. Times wrote: ‘And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness. The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow. When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: ‘Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?’ In the great Battles of Caucus and Primary he smote the conniving Hillary, wife of the deposed King Bill the Priapic and their barbarian hordes of Working Class Whites.
‘And so it was, in the fullness of time, before the harvest month of the appointed year, the Child ventured forth — for the first time — to bring the light unto all the world. He travelled fleet of foot and light of camel, with a small retinue that consisted only of his loyal disciples from the tribe of the Media. He ventured first to the land of the Hindu Kush, where the Taliban had harboured the viper of al-Qaeda in their bosom, raining terror on all the world. And the Child spake and the tribes of Nato immediately loosed the Caveats that had previously bound them. And in the great battle that ensued the forces of the light were triumphant. For as long as the Child stood with his arms raised aloft, the enemy suffered great blows and the threat of terror was no more. From there he went forth to Mesopotamia where he was received by the great ruler al-Maliki, and al-Maliki spake unto him and blessed his Sixteen Month Troop Withdrawal Plan even as the imperial warrior Petraeus tried to destroy it.
‘And lo, in Mesopotamia, a miracle occurred. Even though the Great Surge of Armour that the evil Bush had ordered had been a terrible mistake, a waste of vital military resources and doomed to end in disaster, the Child’s very presence suddenly brought forth a great victory for the forces of the light. And the Persians, who saw all this and were greatly fearful, longed to speak with the Child and saw that the Child was the bringer of peace. At the mention of his name they quickly laid aside their intrigues and beat their uranium swords into civil nuclear energy ploughshares. From there the Child went up to the city of Jerusalem, and entered through the gate seated on an ass. The crowds of network anchors who had followed him from afar cheered ‘Hosanna’ and waved great palm fronds and strewed them at his feet.’ It goes on. I’m just halfway through it. It’s an excellent piece. Gerard Baker, Times Online U.K.