Obama Plays Dangerous Political Game with Our National Security

RUSH: You want to hear the most ridiculous headline of the day? Here is the most ridiculous headline of the day. It is from The Politico, and it’s in a story by Mike Allen. I have that story right here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers: ‘Obama Vows Further Deficit Cutting.’ Greetings, my friends. Welcome. It’s Rush Limbaugh and the EIB Network, the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. Great to have you with us. Three full hours of broadcast excellence straight ahead. The telephone number if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882. And the e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.

We are releasing terrorists from Gitmo. We are investigating their interrogators. The president of the United States said, ‘I don’t want to look backward, I want to look forward.’ The attorney general says, screw you, Mr. President, I’m going to look backward and we’re going to go ahead and prosecute some of these people. And the president, oh, okay, it’s up to the attorney general. All of this is very serious stuff. I think the Democrat Party and President Obama are engaged in the most dangerous political gamble in history. We are releasing terrorists from Guantanamo Bay, we are investigating their interrogators; we might prosecute the interrogators. This is as unsustainable as running up trillions of dollars of debt every year, the CBO says seven trillion of new deficit debt the next ten years, the Obama White House says nine trillion. Remember, now, you could spend $100 every second and it would take you nearly 2,900 years to spend $9 trillion.

It used to be said, ladies and gentlemen, the national debt’s no big deal because we owe it to ourselves. We now owe it to the Chinese. It is not just to ourselves. In the midst of all this the president reappoints Ben Bernanke, a Republican appointee to run the Fed for a second term coming off of his no-news vacation up in Marxist Vineyard and they’re doing nothing but making news at Marxist Vineyard. I think it was probably true. I think the Obama administration wanted a week off. I do think they wanted no cameras, no action, no this, no that, but they can’t get get away from the criticism coming their way, and the town hall protests continue. We’ve got audio sound bites in some of the latest.

Russ Feingold is out there now. ‘US Sen. Russ Feingold told a large crowd gathered for a listening session in Iron County last week there would likely be no health care bill before the end of the year — and perhaps not at all. It was an assessment Feingold said he didn’t like, but the prospect of no health care legislation brought a burst of applause from a packed house of nearly 150 citizens at the Mercer Community Center. ‘Nobody is going to bring a bill before Christmas, and maybe not even then, if this ever happens,’ Feingold said. ‘The divisions are so deep. I never seen anything like that.” What you are doing is working. Keep it up. Do not believe this stuff that it isn’t going to happen, that it won’t happen ’til Christmas, they’re trying to get you to stand down, they’re trying to get you to pretend that you’ve won and that you’ll go away.

In the meantime, folks, this is terribly serious now. Future deficits upgraded by the White House to nine trillion, the Congressional Budget Office to seven trillion. It doesn’t matter. Seven trillion, nine trillion, it doesn’t matter. We don’t have it. This is going to be devastating to our economy. Hyperinflation is something Senator Charles Grassley is warning about now unless the fed gets its arms around monetary policy. Even if they do that with this much debt and this much borrowing I don’t know how you stave off hyperinflation. Grassley is worried about the hyperinflation that he saw during the 1980s, but then in headline: ‘Obama Vows Further Deficit Cutting?’ When are these people in the media going to understand this is not a game? On the very day that the White House announces $7 trillion in new deficit debt, they essentially do a stenography story: ‘The Obama White House on Tuesday reiterated its projection that the recession will end in the second half of 2009 and said that President Obama plans to take further steps to reduce the deficit in next year’s budget. The White House Office of Management and Budget mid-session review –‘ by the way, this is why they didn’t want any of this news coming out in August.

This is why they wanted health care done in August. This is why they wanted cap and trade done early. ‘Obama Vows Further Deficit Cutting.’ This is classic. He talks the conservative game; he talks the experience of the American consumer using free market terms and lingo while spending this nation into debt that we may never get out of. Here’s the thing that you have to remember about this. I got an instant message today from a friend earlier this morning about all this just appalled at how this is going to totally screw up the Obama plan and so forth. And here’s the truth. None of this, be it seven trillion, be it nine trillion, none of this is bad news for Obama, as far as his plans and intentions are concerned. His plan is to wreck the private sector. His plan is to totally deplete it. Transfer as much wealth from the private sector to the government sector as he can. This is why this is serious stuff and it’s why this is dangerous. He wants to be the black FDR. If you go back and look at some of FDR’s fireside chats you’ll see FDR did the same thing, talked a big, big conservative game but was out there ripping private businesses and enterprises all to shreds as the big demons, as the big villains.

He’s talking a good free enterprise game, Obama is, all the while destroying it. That’s what you can never forget, folks. I know this sounds controversial to say, but there is no other way around it. Nobody, nobody who wanted to lift the private sector would be doing anything that they’re doing, not one thing. In fact, let me ask you a question. Remember last year at about this time, it was closer as we get to September, but about this time last year, do you remember when everybody in Washington was absolutely hysterical in a meltdown that the world was going to fall completely apart if we didn’t pass the TARP bailout, if we didn’t rescue the financial sector, we had 24 hours. It was bad. It was horrible. We would all die. There would be no money, anywhere, ever again. The State-Controlled Media spinning circles around us all shouting that this was Armageddon. McCain canceled his campaign, came off his campaign to deal with this emergency. I know this happened in September but we’re not that far away from one year ago. That’s when McCain lost the presidency, if he ever had a chance of winning it, was on that day when he suspended the campaign.

Now, I want to ask you, between 11 months ago and today, what has changed for the good? Somebody tell me one thing that has changed for the good. Is all we can say that for all that drama it could be worse? Tell me, is your life better off now than it was a year ago? After all of these rescues began, we had all these rescues, we had all these bailouts, we had to save the automobile industry, we had to do this, we had to do that, and then Obama comes into office and we had to stimulate the economy with government spending, we had to do all of this and all of that, we’ve lost three million jobs since last year. Our financial circumstances are not better. People are still under water in their houses. What in the name of Sam Hill has gotten better since the government decided to fix everything that was supposedly an Armageddon type crisis one year ago? Not one thing is better off, not one thing. In fact, we are dangerously close to being at greater risk from a foreign attack than we have ever been.

What is it about the left and the Democrat Party that just has to take down the CIA, be it Jimmy Carter, be it Frank Church, whatever Democrat administration it is we’ve gotta take down the CIA; we have got to destroy our ability to covertly spy on our enemies. We are now turning our enemies into the good guys. We are turning us into the villains of the world. We are turning our own country into the villains of the world. We are going back and prosecuting people who saved American lives. We are investigating people who saved American lives. All of this, I mean this is chump change, here you have three terrorists — let’s just focus on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for a moment — he was waterboarded, we waterboarded people three times, and it all worked. Now, here we have guys that killed 3,000 Americans and we’re worried that we might have upset them psychologically by threatening them with a power drill or faking an assassination of a terrorist in another room with a gunshot? And we think this is going to destroy these people’s terrible, delicate psyche, after these people are 3,000 mass murderers?

I’m going to tell you what this is about. This is about Bill Ayers getting his completed work done by Barack Obama and Eric Holder. Bill Ayers who blew up the Pentagon, Bill Ayers, an Obama buddy, anti-America, anti-America supremacy, anti-America superpower trying to cut this country down to size from the SDS days in the sixties and now he’s got a his guy in the White House pulling this off. We’re going to investigate people who saved American lives, as though they are guilty. We are releasing terrorists from Guantanamo Bay, and they’re going back to the battlefield. It is unconscionable what is happening with this. This is the kind of thing that happens in banana republics and Third World nations where you go back and you prosecute your predecessors. And here’s Obama once again making it look like he’s not even in charge. He even went to the CIA and he lied to them, he said we’re not going to look back, I only want to look forward, I don’t care what happened in the past, I’m president now. And so Holder comes up and says, well, we’re going to go ahead and look back.

All of this, folks, as I told you yesterday, there’s a two-pronged purpose to it. One of the purposes is to distract everybody from the failure of the public option on his health care plan, is to get his lunatic fringe left-wing base back on board, which has worked. MoveOn.org and these other places are ecstatic that we’re now attacking America, that we’re attacking the CIA, that we’re attacking interrogators. They’re back on board because they care more about America being the villain in the world than they care about a public option in a health care plan. So it’s worked from that standpoint, I predicted it yesterday. But in addition to that it is very serious because Holder is serious about holding to account these people who saved American lives. Now, if Obama is not deliberately trying to destroy our economy and not trying to deliberately render this country vulnerable to attack then he is the most misguided man in history. If you just look at the facts, remove emotion from all of this, reasonable people can conclude Obama does not like this country or the exceptional people who have made it great.

Obama’s got a chip on his shoulder, he’s angry about something. He not only apologizes for America everywhere he goes, he’s investigating heroes with the goal of prosecuting them. He’s trying to say, ‘Oh, it’s not me, it’s Holder.’ Oh, yeah, as though he can’t stop Holder from doing this. This is leadership from a commander-in-chief? While a commander-in-chief is apologizing for investigating and prosecuting our heroes, Obama is destroying the economy and bankrupting the country. It’s a double whammy. I don’t know, though. I don’t know if there’s anything President Obama can do to distract a majority of Americans from 10% unemployment, trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, while pulling the plug on grandma and attacking the people who kept this country safe when nothing and no one seemed to be safe. After 9/11, we didn’t know who hit us, why we were attacked, or when it would be safe to travel again, much less go to the store. But we knew if those bloodthirsty cowards were successful again, fear would grip the country and commerce would grind to a halt, America would be humiliated, brought to her knees in the eyes of the enemy, and that was unacceptable.

We got in gear to make sure it didn’t happen again. Everything depended on preventing another attack. Everything depended on destroying those who attacked us. It was not a partisan position for the first two weeks after 9/11. America demanded the government protect us, and our government delivered. The only thing missing has been a ticker-tape parade celebrating the heroes. And now we have a president, we’ve elected a president who is engaged in a political scorched-earth policy. It’s pure and simple. But it’s not just America he’s destroying. Democrats are being sacrificed on the altar of Obama’s authoritarian fascism. The man is eating his own. We gotta stop calling it socialism, folks, because socialism’s lost it’s bite and what he’s doing is really not socialism anyway. Socialism is where the government owns the means of production. Fascism is where politicians run it but it’s privately owned. We are fascists. Obama is turning this into a fascist nation, think Mussolini. Other than the automobile business, some of the banks, they’ve taken that over and they’re running that, but for the most part he’s in bed now with the Big Pharma. He’s going to be in bed with them and running it, making decisions for the private sector but he’s not going to own it. But he’s got everybody scared to death.

So fascism is the more apt analogy to what this country is becoming with Barack Obama at the helm. And because it is his party and they are engaged in the biggest and most dangerous political gamble in history, they are betting that Obama’s march to fascism and his relentless slandering of America will result in their reelection. They are thinking this is a way to prolong their power. What happens if we get hit? What happens if there is another terrorist attack? This country is not as protected as it should be. This administration is in the process of tearing down any effort to protect this country by prosecuting the people who would do it. You’ve got to have covert secret operations. Now, if those covert secret operations do indeed violate the law, then you deal with it, but you don’t tear down entire institutions. I like seeing Obama and his party commit political suicide, I really do, but the problem with that is, folks, the question is this: What expires first, our country or the Democrat Party?

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RUSH: The Obama White House has predicted unemployment will also be far worse than previously stated, and they’re going to try to rub this off on the Bush administration. They’re going to say, ‘Well, we weren’t told all the data.’ Remember when Biden said, ‘Well, we guessed wrong’? Are you people guessing wrong again in the White House? ‘Obama Vows Further Deficit Cutting.’ That insults my intelligence. They want and need to believe that Obama is working hard trying to cut the deficit and here he comes with this announcement, seven trillion, nine trillion more in debt. Obama’s unemployment figures worse than we thought? What’s he doing about it? Nothing! This is what he wants. I know that’s controversial.

Let’s talk about Obama’s health care plan for just a second. I have not heard either President Obama or any of his sycophants explain how their government-run health care plan is going to improve the quality of medicine, have you? I have not heard them say how government-run health care will improve or advance medical science and technology. I have not heard them make the case that government-run health care will increase research and development. And you know why? It’s going to kill it all. It’s going to kill all those things. They use the terms of radical leftism. They speak in terms of ‘rights’ and ‘equality,’ and they use tactics to attack and smear opponents. But they cannot advance their case for national health care by arguing their approach will improve anything. Just like their economic policy is not improving anything, their health care approach will not improve anything by design.

So Obama and the Justice Department have now officially declared war against the CIA. They have as their purpose the destruction of our intelligence services. The last time this occurred was the 1970s, folks. We paid a terrible price for it on 9/11. Remember, now, Eric Holder, the attorney general… Snerdley, you may not know this. Eric Holder’s law firm, Covington & Burling, provides several top litigators to terrorists at Gitmo to defend them. Eric Holder is carrying their water. He’s not representing the best interests of the nation. He’s trying to get his law firm buddies clients … against the federal government to defend terrorists. Eric Holder’s law firm, Covington & Burling, is providing the lawyers to defend the terrorists at Gitmo. And then we are now prosecuting the investigators at Gitmo. We are the enemy! We are the villain of the world and our enemies are the good guys.

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RUSH: A little correction here, folks. Eric Holder’s law firm Covington & Burling defended the Gitmo terrorists pro bono. So there was no exchange of money, but nevertheless Eric Holder’s firm Covington & Burling provided top litigators, top defense lawyers to terrorists at Club Gitmo to defend them. Well, in a way it’s worse, but I don’t know. Terrorists don’t have the money to pay ’em so it would have had to come from taxpayers if they were paid, but it was pro bono. Now, Obama, in declaring war against the CIA, is picking up where his buddy Bill Ayers left off, it’s the same mentality. We actually have an administration doing the bidding of terrorists now. I know. It’s like every other rock-solid claim made about this administration. It sounds controversial.

But who benefits from this? Always ask that question: Who benefits from investigating and prosecuting our interrogators? Who benefits when the attorney general’s law firm provides defenders for terrorists at Guantanamo Bay? Who benefits? It’s the enemy. It’s the enemy who benefits here. Nobody else. This is not about due process and human rights. Not about the rule of law. This is not about American ideals. It’s about undermining our intelligence services, which the hard left has always hated and they’ve always attacked. For those of you new to all this, this is not new. Jimmy Carter had the same mentality. In the seventies, Frank Church. He was a senator from I think it was Idaho, and he did some of the greatest damage to the CIA that’s ever been done.

It’s something that Democrats and liberals do the moment they get in power is start attacking intelligence services. So what you have here is the administration advancing the Bill Ayers and ACLU agenda, a radical-left agenda that will weaken this nation and poses a serious threat to the security of our citizens. This is why Obama and his people cannot be trusted — and I think why they aren’t, increasingly, trusted. They cannot be trusted to protect this nation. They cannot be trusted to protect our health care system. They can’t be trusted with the federal budget. They can’t be trusted to protect the American private sector and job creation. They just can’t be trusted generally. They’re radicals in every sense of the word and in everything they are doing, and I know it’s controversial and shocking, but all this is being done on purpose.

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RUSH: Dick Cheney ‘gave The Weekly Standard a statement Monday night about the CIA documents and the coming Justice Department investigation.’ Cheney said: ‘The documents released Monday clearly demonstrate that the individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda. This intelligence saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks. These detainees also, according to the documents, played a role in nearly every capture of al Qaeda members and associates since 2002. The activities of the CIA in carrying out the policies of the Bush Administration were directly responsible for defeating all efforts by al-Qaeda to launch further mass casualty attacks against the United States.

‘The people involved deserve our gratitude. They do not deserve to be the targets of political investigations or prosecutions. President Obama’s decision to allow the Justice Department to investigate and possibly prosecute CIA personnel, and his decision to remove authority for interrogation from the CIA to the White House, serves as a reminder, if any were needed, of why so many Americans have doubts about this Administration’s ability to be responsible for our nation’s security.’ That’s Vice President Cheney. I would have to add to this ‘doubts about the administration’s ability.’ I would add, ‘and desire to be responsible for our nation’s security.’

If you’re going to run around and apologize for the United States all over the world — if you think the United States has been immoral and unjust since its founding, if you think the United States has been unfairly squandering the world’s resources, if you think that the United States has been polluting the world to the point of destroying the planet, if you think the United States has bullied people around the world and you think this has gotta stop and you’re apologizing — don’t even you think somebody ought to get even with the United States?

Fouad Ajami with a brilliant piece posted on the Wall Street Journal website last night for publication in their newspaper today, and it basically cuts to the chase. I have the piece here, and I could read elements of it to you. It’s just right on the money. The headline of this: ‘Obama’s Summer of Discontent.’ The subhead: ‘The politics of charisma is so Third World. Americans were never going to buy into it for long.’ I can summarize this piece: Fouad Ajami says Barack Obama is not American. Not that he wasn’t born here. Not that he’s false and not that he’s violating the Constitution. Culturally, he’s not American. I’ll give you excerpts from Fouad Ajami’s piece to back that up. Fouad Ajami does NOT write that. Now, don’t misunderstand. This is my synthesizing of the piece.

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RUSH: From Fouad Ajami, Wall Street Journal: ”Obama’s Summer of Discontent’ — All this hero-worship before Mr. Obama met his first test of leadership. In reality, he was who he was, a Chicago politician who had done well by his opposition to the Iraq war. He had run a skillful campaign, and had met a Clinton machine that had run out of tricks and a McCain campaign that never understood the nature of the contest of 2008. He was no FDR, and besides the history of the Depression — the real history — bears little resemblance to the received narrative of the nation instantly rescued, in the course of 100 days or 200 days, by an interventionist state.’ That didn’t happen. ‘The economic distress had been so deep and relentless that FDR began his second term, in 1937, with the economy still in the grip of recession. Nor was JFK about style.’ This follows a piece earlier in the column where Obama compares himself to Lincoln, FDR and JFK.

‘JFK had known military service and combat, and familial loss; he had run in 1960 as a hawk committed to the nation’s victory in the Cold War. He and his rival, Richard Nixon, shared a fundamental outlook on American power and its burdens. Now that realism about Mr. Obama has begun to sink in, these iconic figures of history had best be left alone. They can’t rescue the Obama presidency. Their magic can’t be his. Mr. Obama isn’t Lincoln with a BlackBerry. Those great personages are made by history, in the course of history, and not by the spinners or the smitten talking heads. In one of the revealing moments of the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama rightly observed that the Reagan presidency was a transformational presidency in a way Clinton’s wasn’t. And by that Reagan precedent, that Reagan standard, the faults of the Obama presidency are laid bare. Ronald Reagan, it should be recalled, had been swept into office by a wave of dissatisfaction with Jimmy Carter and his failures. At the core of the Reagan mission was the recovery of the nation’s esteem and self-regard.

‘Reagan was an optimist. He was Hollywood glamour to be sure, but he was also Peoria, Ill. His faith in the country was boundless, and when he said it was ‘morning in America’ he meant it; he believed in America’s miracle and had seen it in his own life, in his rise from a child of the Depression to the summit of political power. The failure of the Carter years was, in Reagan’s view, the failure of the man at the helm and the policies he had pursued at home and abroad. At no time had Ronald Reagan believed that the American covenant had failed, that America should apologize for itself in the world beyond its shores. There was no narcissism in Reagan. It was stirring that the man who headed into the sunset of his life would bid his country farewell by reminding it that its best days were yet to come. In contrast, there is joylessness in Mr. Obama. He is a scold, the ‘Yes we can!’ mantra is shallow, and at any rate, it is about the coming to power of a man, and a political class, invested in its own sense of smarts and wisdom, and its right to alter the social contract of the land.

‘In this view, the country had lost its way and the new leader and the political class arrayed around him will bring it back to the right path. Thus the moment of crisis would become an opportunity to push through a political economy of redistribution and a foreign policy of American penance. The independent voters were the first to break ranks. They hadn’t underwritten this fundamental change in the American polity when they cast their votes for Mr. Obama. American democracy has never been democracy by plebiscite, a process by which a leader is anointed, then the populace steps out of the way, and the anointed one puts his political program in place.’ That’s not America. ‘In the American tradition, the ‘mandate of heaven’ is gained and lost every day and people talk back to their leaders. They are not held in thrall by them. The leaders are not infallible or a breed apart. That way is the Third World way, the way it plays out in Arab and Latin American politics.’ This is why I summarized Fouad Ajami’s piece by saying he’s claiming, basically, that Obama is not American. I’m not saying he’s not a citizen. He’s not culturally an American.

Final paragraph: ‘Those protesters in those town-hall meetings have served notice that Mr. Obama’s charismatic moment has passed,’ something I noted on this program a couple weeks ago, the cult-like ability to sway the masses with speeches is over. ‘Once again, the belief in that American exception that set this nation apart from other lands is re-emerging. Health care is the tip of the iceberg. Beneath it is an unease with the way the verdict of the 2008 election was read by those who prevailed. It shall be seen whether the man swept into office in the moment of national panic will adjust to the nation’s recovery of its self-confidence.’ That is a crucial last line. Fouad Ajami says we’re coming back. His point early in the piece was that we were in panic a year ago. We were told our economy was falling apart. We were told the next 24 hours are crucial or nobody would have any money. The financial system was going to collapse.

Do you remember this? Then McCain quits the campaign for a day to deal with it, and the crisis mentality is cemented, and we have a crisis mentality falling on the heels of the anger over the war in Iraq, the seeming discontent, and that Obama is swept into office during a moment of national lack of confidence, national panic and fear. His point now is we’re getting our confidence back as Americans, as a nation. The notion that American exceptionalism has not been lost is coming back and that Obama is unprepared to deal with a confident citizenry. He can only deal with a citizenry in panic and in crisis, and in saying this, Mr. Ajami is confirming my thoughts that all of this economic crisis, foreign policy, is by design. The more in panic you are, the greater the odds Obama has of prevailing.

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RUSH: And on top of all this, during the no-news week of vacation at Marxist Vineyard, the Obama administration announces that 90,000 Americans might die from swine flu. They might not, either, but they might die. We might have to close cities; we might have to quarantine people. Let’s create crisis at every moment of every day, all to distract us from Obama’s real agenda.