RUSH: Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, in a wide-ranging monologue, largely ad-libbed (as most of mine are), I offered a suspicion that this whole business of Barack Obama’s prayer at the Western Wall in Jerusalem was a ruse and that the campaign intended for that prayer to be found and to be made public. Well, lo and behold, from a blog called the Israeli Insider, ‘What initially seemed to be a journalist scoop of dubious moral propriety now seems to be a case of an Israeli paper being played by the Obama campaign. Maariv, the second most popular newspaper in Israel, ‘was roundly criticized for publishing the note that Obama left in the Western Wall but now a Maariv spokesperson says that publication of the note was preapproved for international publication by the campaign, leading to the conclusion that the ‘private’ prayer was intentionally leaked for public consumption.’
Now, the Obama campaign is denying this, and the Maariv newspaper says they’re standing by it to a certain extent. The truth of this is not factually known, but instinctively we know what the truth is. This is no different, this prayer being made public, than the 50th anniversary of D-Day. Remember our cameras captured Bill Clinton down on the beam at Normandy, where there are no stones, there are no rocks; and Clinton is trundling along very solemn, very much in sorrow, with a lone battleship out on the horizon. Clinton is walking along, the cameras following him from just offshore. ‘Well, what do I have here? Look at all those stones,’ and he kneeled down and he made a cross out of the stones. There just happened to be photographers close by to take the pictures and, of course, it’s no different than this. Everything in this campaign, the Obama campaign, is a strategical pander. Everything about it. Everything about it is stagecraft. It doesn’t matter. It’s what it is. But there isn’t a whole lot of substance here. As I’ve been saying for years and years and years: the Democrat Party and liberalism are symbolism over substance.
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RUSH: Eileen in South Wales, New York, nice to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush, congratulations.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I hope you have 20 more. I waited for you for 30 years. I voted for Barry Goldwater, so you know how old I am.
RUSH: Wow.
CALLER: I was watching MSNBC last night, which I don’t do too often, and Obama was being interviewed by someone about why he didn’t go visit the soldiers.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: And he started to fumble around and gave the same answers, and then his voice kind of lowered, and he said, ‘I did go to Walter Reed recently, and I visited, but I didn’t say anything to anybody.’ And then I remembered that you had said a couple days ago that it would have been nice if he had visited them and hadn’t said anything about it. And I thought, yeah, well, you’ve said something about it now.
RUSH: This is an ongoing controversy that is surrounding Obama, and that is his bailing out of two troop visits while in Germany to instead work out.
CALLER: Hm-hm. But he picked right up on what you suggested —
RUSH: Well, they all listen. They will never admit it, but they all monitor. They’ve got somebody out there monitoring to see what’s said here, and if I come up with a good idea, they’ll use it, like using the homeless in Denver rather than try to sweep ’em off the streets. But this business with the soldiers, now, this to me is interesting. Because as is the case with every Obama, quote, unquote, controversy, this thing has more tentacles to it and trying to understand it and get your arms around it is next to impossible because so many people say so many different things, and the original aspect gets obscured. Now, the original thing, the point about which everybody is arguing is, the original report, Obama was slated to go see some six soldiers, recovering soldiers at two hospitals in Germany and bailed out. He didn’t go, as the original report said, because he chose to work out. Then they said, ‘Why?’ The Obama campaign said, ‘We didn’t want to make this a political event. That would have been bad form.’ Then the Pentagon got involved, and they said, ‘Well, he can’t bring certain people with him because if he does, if he brings campaign people, even military people that are retired that are serving in advisory roles, then that would be a campaign event, we can’t have that, because the military can’t show preference.’ And then somebody said, ‘You can’t bring the media, there won’t be any pictures.’
Then people said, ‘A-ha, that’s why he didn’t go, because there’s no photo-op here and so there’s no value in it.’ The campaign’s denying that. The Pentagon is saying one thing; the Obama campaign is saying another. The whole thing has gotten so cloudy and murky that people have forgotten the only thing you need to remember, that he had scheduled two troop hospital visits — and you figure this has been squared up with the Pentagon, the military was running this trip, and then all of a sudden he doesn’t go; he canceled the trips. Now, that’s all you need to know. Everything after that is simply CYA. He didn’t go. There were ways he could have gone. He could have gone with nobody knowing, and he could have said so later, and he could have said so in a flowery speech. He could have used it in a very up, evenhanded way. He didn’t need to come out of there and make a press conference the minute he walked out, he was on a fact-finding trip, right? This is all about fact finding. Okay, so go visit these two hospitals, take a limited number of people in there with you, walk out, go back to your next appointment, fly on to London, Germany, France, wherever, and at some point later on down the road, you explain what you did.
But he didn’t. So the excuses have mounted. Everything that happens with Obama, we get an excuse. We get an excuse for Jeremiah Wright. We get an excuse for Bill Ayers. We get an excuse for his misstatements about timetables in Iraq. We get excuse after excuse after excuse for the things this guy says that are inconsistent, for the behavior that is inconsistent, for the things that make no sense. Now, like this prayer that was ostensibly stolen by a yeshiva student in Israel when in fact there can be no doubt — this is a Democrat Party political campaign — could be no doubt that the intention of that prayer was to be made public, by hook or by crook, somehow, some way, and it eventually was. So mission accomplished. Everything that follows that is just a bunch of noise. The fact is the people saw the prayer, and the reason they want the prayer out there is to do battle with the notion that exists somewhere in the blogosphere that he’s a Muslim. There’s a surprisingly high number of people that think that, so they want to battle that. So everything here is stagecraft. And when the stage act couldn’t be pulled off as they originally wanted it by visiting the sick troops, then pull out of there, just don’t go and understand that you’re going to have your way with the Drive-By Media covering for you, fulminating over your explanation, amplifying it and putting it out there, and the Republicans are going to be left appearing like a bunch of Chihuahuas yapping at his ankles when he’s going to be given the moral high ground of not wanting to politicize a trip to sick, recovering, wounded soldiers.
Well, the fact is, he bailed because there was nothing in it for him, even though there was. He could have used whatever he had gleaned in a very classy way in a future speech, at his convention, or what have you, and he could have made ‘new’ news. He could have snuck in there. Even he could have gone in there without cameras, you know they’ve got body watch people on him in the media. They would have seen him go in there. It would have been even better if he’d gone in there without a camera crew, without anybody documenting it, stayed in there for whatever length of time, come out, ‘What did you do in there?’ ‘I saw some sick troops. I saw some wounded.’ Can you imagine the Drive-Bys putting that story out? It was a totally blown opportunity. This comes from the arrogance and the condescension that exists, I think, primarily as general attitudes that leftists have, particularly those with egos the size of Obama. So he’s on MSNBC last night and he had to let the cat out of the bag, ‘Well, I’ve been to Walter Reed.’ See, they don’t do everything right in this campaign, and everybody thinks that this is a well-oiled machine that makes no mistakes, and that everything that happens is a result of a brilliantly conceived and flawlessly executed plan, and it is not.
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RUSH: You people have to understand this. This was photo-op, photo-op, photo-op, photo-op. That’s all this was about. And when there was no chance for a photo-op with the troops, don’t go see the troops, ’cause Obama was with the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was playing basketball with them, remember that? He got off the plane walking the tarmac with them! Uh-huh. Mmm-hmm. Yeah. Well, here’s the thing about that. Remember, Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington, complaining that all those pictures were provided by the military, and the military was doing all the interviews in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was fake journalism, she said, fake interviews. So it was managed. So we don’t know how much of it was genuine, how of much it was put up.
The military was managing this thing. The military wants to stay out of politics. You know, it could well be, uh, ladies and gentlemen — and look, when Obama creates this kind of vacuum on the story like this and tries to obfuscate and confuse the answer, then it automatically leads to speculation by informed, intelligent people like you and me. Maybe — just to throw out a possibility here, maybe — Obama, the Most Merciful Messiah, Lord Barack Obama, chose not to go to the hospital, the two hospitals in Germany because didn’t want to run the risk that the troops don’t like him. I mean, the troops are not idiots. These people, they’ve been wounded. They watch the news. They know the Democrat Party has invested in defeat.
They know that Obama is still invested in defeat. They know that Obama and the Democrats, if they can, will still secure defeat in Iraq if they can hang it on Bush. It’s ‘Bush’s war. Bush’s war.’ I’ve been to Afghanistan. I know they watch the news. They’re not ignorant of what is happening. They remember Harry Reid waving the white flag, ‘This war is lost.’ They remembered Harry Reid, they remember Pelosi, they remember Murtha, and don’t forget Obama, who’s out there saying before he gets to Germany, that the troops really didn’t even do all that much to bring about the success of the surge! So it’s possible. It’s possible that the troops really didn’t want him there. He was afraid. It’s not that they wouldn’t see him. Maybe he was afraid he would get less than a welcomed treatment. Never know.