RUSH: I checked e-mail as I do during the top-of-the-hour break and I got, Mr. Snerdley, a tremendous amount of e-mails. ‘What a great hour! What a great opening!’ Folks, you might think it was good, and I appreciate it, but I can’t tell you, it upsets me, I can’t tell you how disconcerting it is to 
have to say these things. I don’t show up behind this microphone every day and make things up, and I have to tell you that thinking the things I’m thinking and believing things I’m believing, I don’t like it. I don’t like having a president about whom I say, ‘I don’t think this guy likes America.’ But the evidence is overpowering. This investigation of the CIA, this is designed to weaken us. The reason we had no idea what was going on with 9/11 was because of the Church committee and previous Democrat actions, Jamie Gorelick and the wall, the Democrat Party, the American left has had as one of its missions the weakening of our intelligence services, even the dismantling of them, and we paid the price on 9/11. We had no human intelligence. We weren’t allowed to do a number of things, share information from one agency to the next, so we got hit.
So we did what we could to build it back up, and the people who prevented another attack are now under investigation. And the president is such a coward, he’s hiding behind the notion that it’s the attorney general doing it all, that the attorney general’s responsible for enforcing the laws of the land. He works for Obama, the attorney general does. This is so classic, Obama can say, ‘Well, I said we don’t want to look backward, we want to look forward,’ and here’s Holder coming along looking backwards on purpose. There are many elements here. The public option and health care is in huge trouble. We’ve got Feingold out there now saying no health care bill by Christmas, maybe not ever. Democrat Senator, Russ Feingold, joining Democrat Congressman Jack Murtha saying the same thing a couple weeks ago. Obama’s losing his base, he’s losing independents, he’s losing the Republicans that voted for him. So it’s time now during the no-news week of vacation to come out and make news as often as possible, and that is in a way that rallies his base.
It’s just sickening to me; it is disheartening that the way this Democrat president has to rally his base is to take steps that weaken the security of the United States of America. I do not like reading Fouad Ajami’s piece, even though it’s brilliant and right on the money. It’s one of those things I wish I’d written myself that you say once you read it, and I don’t like concluding from it the obvious, that Barack Obama’s not an American in the sense that he doesn’t understand American exceptionalism. He understands America transgression. He believes in American guilt around the world and domestically. And he’s out to change the guilt. He doesn’t understand American exceptionalism. He was swept into office during a moment of huge self-doubt among the electorate, a lack of confidence in the country, partly created by Democrats and elite politicians telling us if we didn’t do something to bail out the financial services sector that there might not be any money tomorrow. You remember all that. It was almost just a year ago. I remind you again that nothing’s better since then.
Since we’ve taken steps to fix all these crises, what has improved? Nothing. And who benefits from that? A few people got new cars, yip yip yip yahoo. On a national sense there’s nothing better off here and not with all these people losing their jobs and no prospects for finding jobs. These are real people; these are real Americans that are experiencing this kind of thing totally unnecessarily. This is not the way you stimulate the US economy. So, folks, I’m telling you, it’s painful. It is disconcerting to say all this stuff; it’s disconcerting to think it. My stomach was in knots during the first hour saying this stuff. God, I hope I am wrong, but I just don’t think I am. And then to see that Obama is projecting the deficit to be $9 trillion greater and some stupid media flack comes along and says Obama is going to cut deficits further just because that’s what the White House says, so they dutifully report it as though they’re stenographers.
Then you look at this interrogation stuff. We heard reports that interrogators threatened the detainees’ families. The abuses by the interrogators reported in the press — I think there’s a little test we want to perform here — what I think we have here is a staged mock shooting. You know, we had that in another room, and that was used to get the attention of a terrorist. We wanted to make the terrorist think we have shot one of your buddies in the other room, so we fire off a gun and nobody gets hurt. We had another terrorist threatened with a power drill and a gun, and we have heard about waterboarding and we’re told this is dangerously damaging to a prisoner’s psyche. In the meantime we’re talking to people who killed 3,000 people in cold blood and vowed to do more and were treated as heroes, and we think we’re gonna be upsetting their psychology by threatening them with a frigging power drill?
If this is true, I think they’re pretty clever techniques. I think they’re pretty clever techniques and they’re not harmful. I have a test for evaluating what some people call torture and other people call enhanced interrogations, and here’s the test. Assume for a moment that your child or sibling or spouse or parent is kidnapped by two kidnappers and somehow one of the kidnappers is captured, and the captured kidnapper confesses that this person close to you that’s been kidnapped will be killed in two hours. In that case, what interrogation techniques are appropriate to use?
Well, this a pretty good analogy to what was going on. We had terrorists that were going to kill more Americans, they’re promising to do so, we want to find out how and where, we don’t exactly know when, but we’ve got the mastermind, for crying out loud, what the hell is inappropriate? A power drill is inappropriate? Faking a shooting in another room is inappropriate? I don’t even think this stuff is a close call and now we’re investigating it for the intention of prosecuting it, all the while distracting from Obama’s failures as a president, rallying his base, at the same time weakening the nation’s national security. By the way, these are people who after all this harsh treatment, damage to their psychology, when they’re let loose they go back on the battlefield swearing to kill more Americans.
From the UK Telegraph: ”CIA Interrogator Threatened to Kill Children of September 11 Mastermind’ — A CIA interrogator threatened to kill the children of the September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed if al-Qa’eda attacked the US again.’ And this is a problem? Would somebody explain to me what the problem here is? The guy has just killed 3,000 Americans. He’s swearing and has sworn his life to killing as many Americans as possible. We say, ‘You do it again, you don’t tell us what’s coming next, we’ll kill some of your kids.’ What’s the problem here? Don’t tell me that violates some tenet of torture according to the Geneva Conventions. This is what happens, folks, when you put Democrats in charge. This is what happens when you put radical leftists in charge.
Someday this country is going to learn. It may well be now this country is learning ’cause this is the most radical leftist agenda advanced by a radical leftist party in the course of my lifetime, and I am all of 58 years old. Fouad Ajami is right, people are finally figuring out this is not what we thought we were getting. We thought we were getting a postracial, postpartisan, hunky-dory, put-the-economy-back-together kind of guy who was also, by the same token, because of his skin color, going to erase the original sin of slavery. And yet every bit of criticism of Obama is now labeled racism.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let’s go back to April 20th, 2009. This is Obama at the CIA addressing people who work there.
OBAMA: Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we’ve made some mistakes. That’s how we learn. But the fact that we are willing to acknowledge them and then move forward, that is precisely why I am proud to be president of the United States, and that’s why you should be proud to be members of the CIA.
RUSH: After this speech, Leon Panetta or whoever was running the joint then, had to write a memo to people to keep their morale up because the president of the United States had just come over and told them that they stink and that they’ve done nothing but make mistakes ‘but this is how we learn’ and we’re going to go forward. So everywhere he goes he sees what’s wrong with this country and he tells the people in these institutions how badly they performed. But now that he’s president, we’re going to fix it. So how are we fixing the CIA? We are investigating heroes who saved people’s lives. Now, that was April 20th this year. The next day at the White House, after meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan, President Obama said this about investigating the CIA.
OBAMA: We think that we should be looking forward and not backwards. Uh, I do worry about this getting so politicized that we cannot function effectively and it hampers our ability to carry out critical national security operations.
RUSH: April 21. Then yesterday, August 24th, Eric Holder, the attorney general, says we’re going to do precisely that. We’re going to look backwards and we are going to prosecute. We’re going to investigate with the intention of prosecuting people engaged in ‘torture.’ Which gives rise to the question: Who the hell is running this show? A question many people have asked. Let’s go to Glenn Beck, Fox News yesterday. He spoke to Democrat pollster Pat Caddell. First question: ‘Do you believe that it makes sense they’re trying to collapse the system?’
CADDELL: I was with an administration. The president comes in, a new president who had not been experienced in Washington, but six months in we were… People were still trying to find where the bathrooms were. They found a lot of people still unappointed. Where did all these pieces of programs come in this kind of detail? Where do you get a thousand pages or 1,300 pages, one after the other, in such a short amount of time? Those are questions that somebody ought to ask because it’s the dog that’s not barking here.
RUSH: Pat Caddell from the White House, Jimmy Carter in the first six months: No way they could have put together a thousand- or 1,300-page piece of legislation, and he’s saying this bunch has come up with how many of these, cap and trade, where did this all come from? I can tell you the health care bill in the House has been in Henry Waxman’s drawer. It has been a Democrat wet dream for 20 years! It’s been in his drawer, and he and Pelosi put the finishing touches on this or some of the others, but it’s been a wet dream of theirs I don’t know how long, nationalizing health care. They didn’t have to sit down and write it. It’s already written. So Pat Caddell, next question, from Glenn Beck. ‘People think Obama’s using the unions, but is it possible it’s the other way around? I mean, not just the unions but the vast organizations. He’s not necessarily the grand architect that somebody else has sketched out the Obama agenda?’
CADDELL: When the attorney general Eric Holder — who I’ve not been publicly very fond of ever since he decided to, you know, go in the bag on China on the treasons and trying to buy our election during the Clinton administration that gave us Marc Rich a pardon, one of the most evil men that ever walked the face of the earth, and was covering up and now decides that Black Panthers who carry guns into precincts should not be prosecuted. But despite the president saying, ‘We’re going to move on,’ on interrogation policy, announces he’s going to have a special prosecutor today and appoints one. And I’m going, ‘Wait a minute, who’s running the show here?’ For the first time I’ve had to ask myself, ‘Is Barack Obama really in control?’ And either he’s disingenuous, which I wish not to believe about the president of the United States, or maybe the question is, ‘Who is really in control here?’
RUSH: Here’s Pat Caddell. Now, this guy worked for Jimmy Carter. He’s still a Democrat pollster, and he’s uncomfortable thinking the things he’s thinking. He doesn’t like thinking he’s got a president that lies through his teeth like this. He doesn’t like thinking he’s got a disingenuous president. So the president says back in April, ‘Ah, we’re not going to look backward. We’re not going to be look backward. I don’t want to go to political ramifications here and compromise our national security. We’re going to look forward when it comes to interrogations,’ and then yesterday we’re looking backward, and Caddell is saying: Is he lying to me or is somebody else calling the shots here? You’ve gotta admit it, it’s a question many of you have, ‘Who’s calling the shots?’ because this guy’s got a career of 150 days in the Senate and community agitation in Chicago. At any rate, what a troubling day.