RUSH: I promised that we would continue parsing the Friday night debate between The Messiah and John McCain. Let’s pick up here with Obama saying that we took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan.
RUSH: We did not take our eye off the ball. We never left Afghanistan. We did not stop our theater of operations in Afghanistan. Obama, on Friday night, in this debate lied I can’t tell you how many times, talking about Afghanistan. He said that Al-Qaeda’s back stronger than ever. It’s not! We ran ’em out of Iraq. Al-Qaeda is not stronger than ever, and McCain did not correct him on that, but McCain did respond to this notion we took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan.
MCCAIN: Senator Obama is the chairperson of a committee that oversights NATO that’s in Afghanistan. To this day he’s never had a hearing.
LEHRER: What about that point?
MCCAIN: It’s remarkable.
RUSH: It’s remarkable. And at this point Obama was smirking a la Algore, you know, Algore in the 2000 debate with Bush would sigh when Bush said something Algore thought was stupid. Obama here was just shaking his head and had his head in his hand, wincing and so forth like, ‘Ah, this guy is an idiot,’ and he came back with this.
OBAMA: Look, I’m very proud of my vice presidential, uh, selection, Joe Biden, who’s the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and as he explains and as John well knows, the issues of Afghanistan, the issues of Iraq, critical issues like that don’t go through my subcommittee, because they’re done as a committee as a whole. But that’s Senate inside baseball.
RUSH: They do go through your subcommittee. He lied about that, and then he said, (paraphrasing) ‘It doesn’t matter, my vice president understands this. I don’t need to do hearings. My vice president understands this.’ Your vice president’s a joke. Stand up, Chuck, stand up. In fact, we just played the sound bite of Obama telling people back in Washington, ‘Stand up, step up.’ Stand up, Chuck, oh, my God, oh, Lord, what did I do? God love ya, gee whiz. Well, here’s Obama. He said this twice in the debate Friday night.
OBAMA: Nobody is talking about losing this war. What we are talking about is recognizing that the next president has to have a broader strategic vision about all the challenges that we face.
RUSH: Now, McCain did not swat this one. McCain cleaned up in this section of the debate, don’t misunderstand, he wiped the floor with Obama during the foreign policy part of the debate, but this was a sitting duck, this was a hanging curveball. Nobody is talking about losing this war? Let’s go back to the audio sound bites.
REID: This war is lost. The surge is not accomplishing anything.
RUSH: That was Dingy Harry April 2007. September 7, 2007, Dick Turban.
DURBIN: By carefully manipulating the statistics, the Bush-Petraeus Report will try to persuade us that violence in Iraq is decreasing and the surge is working. Even if the figures are right, the conclusion’s wrong.
RUSH: Durbin accusing Bush and Petraeus of manipulating stats, surge isn’t working, we are losing. Obama said nobody is talking about losing this war. You guys owned defeat in this war. You sought defeat in this war, Obama, and so did your party. Here’s Biden. This is September 9th, 2007, Meet the Press. Tim Russert said, ‘General Petraeus said in a letter to his troops that we have not had the political reconciliation we thought we would have at this time. It’s been much slower but there is some hope. Then he added this. ‘My sense is that we have achieved tactical momentum, wrested the initiative from the enemy in a number of areas in Iraq. We are in short a long way from the goal line but we do have the ball, we’re driving down the field.’ Is that what you expect him to say tomorrow?’
BIDEN: He’s dead, flat wrong. The fact of the matter is that there is — that this idea of the security gains we made have had no impact on the underlying sectarian dynamic, none, none whatsoever.
OBAMA: We, as one of the biggest consumers of oil, 25% of the world’s oil, have to have an energy strategy not just to deal with Russia, but to deal with many of the rogue states we talked about: Iran, Venezuela. And that means, yes, increasing domestic production and offshore drilling.
RUSH ARCHIVE: When I heard him say that, I said, well, wait a minute, he’s never said that. Obama, the Democrats have never come out in favor of drilling. Obama was mocking drilling. Obama was saying it wasn’t necessary, in ten years we’re going to need no more foreign oil. This is what Obama’s position was.
OBAMA: We could save all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling, if everybody was just inflating their tires and — and — and getting regular tune-ups, you could actually save just as much.
RUSH: That’s July 30th of this year. Has he forgotten this? This is how simplistic and simple-minded Obama is. He was never, ever in support of drilling. And at the debate Friday, well, we must drill, of course, domestic drilling, we must do that, blah, blah, blah, blah. He wanted to pass around tire gauges. He was trying to oppose drilling by saying that inflated tires and tune-ups could save as much oil as we would get from drilling. It doesn’t sound to me like he was in favor of drilling, he was opposed to it, and the tire gauge was our weapon against drilling. Then there was this from The Messiah.
OBAMA: Part of what we need to do, what the next president has to do, and this is part of our judgment, this is part of how we are going to keep America safe, is to — to send a message to the world that we are going to invest in issues like education.
RUSH: Now, here he goes again with things wrong with our country, and we’re going to show the world this, and show the world that. Invest in education? Education is as big a mess as the subprime mortgage mess is. Well, it’s pretty close. What we’re getting for the money we’re spending on education is embarrassingly little. We gotta show the world we’re willing to spend money on education? Hey, Obama, we spend more on everything in this country than anyone else in the world spends, including your beloved ChiComs. We spend more on education, we get less for it. But what is this show the world business? Once again the theme is our country is not what it used to be. Our country is going downhill. And then it went on and on in this similar vain. I’m telling you, in the debate that I saw, the last 45 minutes, Obama had the floor wiped, and here we go again because we had all these people, these commentators with the standard template for measuring who won and who lost.
Well, Obama went in as the underdog, because this is foreign policy and that’s McCain’s strong suit, but hey, Obama did really well. He ended up in a tie, and so since he exceeded expectations he actually won. And of course our wizards of smart on our side of the aisle in the media, many of them agreed with that. Polling data is out and all the polls are saying, yes, Obama cleaned up in the debate. Not the debate I saw. I don’t think the people watched the debates the way the Drive-Bys analyze these things. The only thing I could say is the first 25 or 30 minutes when it was on the economy, which is what people remember, it could have been better. Two references to earmarks was enough, but 20 minutes worth of earmarks and pork barrel spending and all that? It was a tough first 25 minutes.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: By the way, one more Democrat who said that Iraq is a failure, Nancy Pelosi, February 10th, 2008, on CNN’s Late Edition: ‘The purpose of the surge was to create a secure time for the government of Iraq to make the political change to bring reconciliation to Iraq. They have not done that. Iraq is a failure. It is a disaster,’ she said to Wolf Blitzer. So Obama, you say nobody was talking about defeat? Practically all the leaders in your party had us defeated, and they were happy about it.