RUSH: Another day, another meaningless Obama summit, this one on nuclear proliferation, at least we hope it’s meaningless. The only thing that would be worse than a meaningless Obama summit is one that makes some real difference, given what his objectives are to cut the United States down to size. And apparently Hillary Clinton didn’t get the memo. Mrs. Clinton said this on Slay the Nation yesterday, Bob Schieffer said, ‘Are nonnuclear weapons so good now, Madam Secretary, we don’t have to rely on nuclear weapons anymore?’
HILLARY: We want to be very clear. We will not use nuclear weapons in retaliation if you do not have nuclear weapons and are in compliance with the NPT. But we leave ourselves a lot of room for contingencies. If we can prove that a biological attack originated in a country that attacked us then all bets are off if these countries have gone to that extent. So we want to deal with the nuclear threat first and foremost because that’s the one that we face right today.
RUSH: Well, now, wait a minute, that’s the exact opposite of what Obama said last week with the new deal that he signed with Medvedev in Russia. Isn’t it convenient, by the way, that that Polish jet went down, a Soviet — I’m sorry, get it right, Rush — a Russian maintained Tupolev-jet. It’s a Russian jet, and the Russians maintained it. Apparently there are tapes of air traffic controllers urging the pilot, ‘Don’t land here, we got heavy fog. You need to reroute to Minsk or go up to Moscow.’ Apparently Kaczynski, the polish president, did not trust these guys. He wanted to get in there and land anyway. He thought being diverted to Moscow was a way to get him to stop going in to town and participating in the 40-year anniversary of the slaughter of a lot of Polish people at Katyn Forest. It’s just amazingly convenient. Putin does not like the Poles, he doesn’t like the Czechs, it’s just convenient here that so many of the Polish high command went down on this airplane. Apparently it is a coincidence, but it’s one of the strangest coincidences of modern times. But apparently the air traffic control people did encourage the pilot, ‘Do not land.’ Now, interestingly, the pilot made four attempts and was dumping fuel in the process. There might have been some kind of mechanical problem. The black boxes, the flight recorders have been found. They’ll be analyzed. Maybe we’ll find out exactly what was wrong with the airplane, if anything, depending on who does the analysis of the black boxes and depending on who reports the results of the black boxes.
But back to Mrs. Clinton, it was last week that Obama said, (paraphrasing) ‘If you don’t have nukes and you hit us with a bio-attack or a chemical attack, we’re not going to nuke you. If you have behaved according to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty we’re not going to nuke you back,’ and everybody was, ‘What the hell is this? We’re going to have a conventional invasion of countries that do this?’ Mrs. Clinton yesterday, (paraphrasing) ‘All bets are off if we can prove that you bio-attacked us or chemo-attacked us, that we will nuke you back.’ Now, who’s right here? Because Obama’s strategery explicitly rules out any nuclear retaliation to any attack other than from a nuclear power. But then again, has Hillary ever been right about anything? If it’s a question here of who’s right and who’s wrong, we’d have to say Hillary got it wrong here. He’s top dog, is what I mean when he’s right. It’s not that he’s factually correct or policy-wise correct. Actually, what we’ve learned here is that Valerie Jarrett, whose only experience in foreign policy is being born in Iran to American parents, her father was a doctor over there, is largely involved in a nuclear effort that Obama has put together. Yeah, FrontPage magazine, David Horowitz’s publication has information of that.
The Drive-Bys, there’s a story today, I don’t know which network it is or news service, but they’re comparing Obama and Reagan on this nuclear effort, that both guys wanted to get rid of nukes. I mean it’s the biggest stretch of the imagination I’ve seen. All of a sudden Reagan, who’s horrible, they have to wipe out Reaganism, they have to do all this revision to keep people from understanding the glorious truth of the Reagan years, all of a sudden now they want to compare Obama to Reagan. James Carafano, is a Heritage Foundation fellow, writing in The Examiner today, says this comparison doesn’t hold any water. ‘Like Reagan, Obama believes America must lead the way to nuclear disarmament. Unlike Reagan, he believes this requires an assertion of ‘moral’ leadership, to be demonstrated simply by reducing our nuclear stockpile and refusing to modernize the US arsenal. It’s a false premise.’ Obama believes if we set that moral standard, that the rest of the world will automatically follow us because he is The One, and he has such persuasive powers simply by being.
‘Reagan recognized that the ultimate goal of arms negotiations is to make the world safer, more stable and more free. To eliminate the need for large nuclear arsenals, he went about eliminating the dependence — both ours and others’ — on massive nuclear attack as the guarantor of security. Thus, the first items on Reagan’s agenda were building up US conventional forces and introducing missile defenses. That allowed his negotiators to approach arms control agreements from a position of strength. Obama has it backward. He started with cutting back on defense — especially in acquisition programs. Bye-bye, F-22. He also cut missile defense,’ not making the Czechs or the Poles happy at all. We basically pulled the rug out from under them. And the missile defense that Reagan started with was, of course, SDI, to protect the continental United States. But even that wasn’t enough to make the Russians happy. They looked at that as a provocation. ”The problem is our America partners are developing missile defenses,’ objected Prime Minister Vladimir Putin last December. ‘Our partners may come to feel completely safe.’ That sounds like a leader who still thinks that maintaining the threat of nuclear attack is a good idea. If not, why is it a ‘problem’ for Americans to feel safe?’
So Obama has this exactly backwards. He’s taken down the missile defenses that Bush had pledged for the Czechs and the Poles; he’s not going to further American missile defense; he’s going to reduce our own stockpiles of nuclear weapons. ‘Reagan understood his adversaries. Obama does not. Russia wants an arms control treaty to solidify its position as a pre-eminent nuclear power,’ and Obama gave them that. When you sit down with Medvedev and you sign this thing, it makes Russia look like they’re back as the Soviet Union, as a second superpower on par with America. We’re all equal and the United States has been the problem in the world. The only way you would sign or even propose a nuclear agreement such as the one Obama did is if you think the United States is and has been the problem in the world. There’s no question about that. Meanwhile, Senator Lieberman, this is yesterday on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace, ‘Is the president going to have to back off that strategy to win your vote for the treaty?’
LIEBERMAN: I’m going to be real hesitant to vote for this treaty unless we have a commitment from the administration that they’re prepared to modernize our nuclear stockpile. I don’t believe that there 
will be 67 votes to ratify the START treaty, unless the information does two things. First, commit to modernize our nuclear stockpile so as we have less nuclear weapons we know they’re capable if, God forbid, we need them. And secondly, to make absolutely clear that some of the statements by Russian President Medvedev at the signing in Prague that seem to suggest that if we continue to build a ballistic missile defense in Europe, that they may pull out of this treaty, it’s just unacceptable to us. We need that defense to protect our allies and ourselves from Iran.
RUSH: And apparently the Russians, because Carafano’s point is well worth asking: Why do the Russians fear us feeling safe? If we’re going to agree to reduce nuclear weapons, and we still have rogue states out there like the North Koreans and the Iranians ramping up their nukes, why do they care that we might have a shield for it or that others in Asia might have a shield provided by us? If the goal is to eliminate nuclear weapons, doesn’t it follow that you would want any attempt to use them to fail? But, no, no, no, Obama is cutting back our defense systems ’cause the Russians don’t want us to have missile defense systems. And that can only happen if you think, if you believe, and if you’ve been told by people like Bill Ayers that the United States is not the solution to the world’s problems
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RUSH: You know, my friends, I have a favorite Shakespeare quote that I use frequently on this broadcast: ‘Brevity is the soul of wit.’ I will adapt it: ‘Strength is the soul of victory.’ Ronald Reagan understood that. Obama believes in neither. He’s simply a blowhard who believes his personal control is the soul of victory. You know what Sherman said about war, General Sherman? ‘War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over,’ and nukes are about as cruel as it gets. So we’re disarming, and if we get the 67 votes to ratify the treaty in the Senate — and I don’t think he’s going to get the 67 votes, but we’ll see. At The Daily Caller (Chatsworth Osborne Jr.’s website), John Ward has a very interesting piece today on who’s not at the nuclear summit. Who’s not at the nuclear summit are our allies! Israel, Australia, Great Britain, Saudi Arabia are not there. But little places like Niger, Malaysia, Ukraine, Armenia. These people are at the nuclear summit.
What the hell’s going on? How do you do this and not have our allies on hand? Interesting point. We can only hope that this is as meaningless as the other summits, although this is a big one. This is a two-day summit. I don’t know if they’re going to have ‘breakout groups’ like they find on all the job summits.
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RUSH: John in Crofton, Maryland. Welcome. You’re back on the EIB Network. Great to have you here.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, you’re the best.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: I was supporting you indirectly Saturday. I went down to the Regency — Hyatt — in Washington, DC, on Capitol Hill. At three o’clock WMAL had the Grandy and Andy guys, and Chris Plante, and we had a regular town meeting, I think they called it a free speech forum. And I guess you were in town at that time. If you had dropped in, I think they would still be trying to repair the place. You would have brought the house down.
RUSH: (laughing) I have to plead ignorance. I did not know this was going on.
CALLER: Oh, yeah, we had a nice crowd.
RUSH: How big?
CALLER: And they had two microphones set up on each aisle, and we got to ask questions of the four or five participants. They were all WMAL guys —
RUSH: Well, yeah, there are a lot of experts at WMAL.
CALLER: Oh, yeah, Chris Plante is doing a hell of a job.
RUSH: Chris Plante, Fred Grandy, Andy.
CALLER: They passed out publications, it was great. But, anyway, the reason I called is because at the top of the show you were talking about this arms limitation nuclear conference in Washington. Of course the place has been tied up since yesterday. Luckily they had this thing I went to on Saturday, but the town is going to be tied up until Wednesday with this stupid thing going on. But they’re trying to compare him to Reagan to kind of give some cache to the stupidity of this decision on his part. I saw Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Gates trying to defend it. And when Gates got backed into a corner, he said, ‘Well, you know, all the chairmen of the Joint Chiefs, they all agree with this.’ That’s what they do every time there’s something that they can’t support. You just played the thing from David Axelrod about Nixon and Chafee reporting something, they had to go with a Republican to say that it’s okay to give it some support. But the economy is also being devastated by this guy, and I know you can’t say it enough, but ‘m worried because I looked at the value of gold a year ago when it was around $800, and now it’s 11, $1,200 sometimes. I know it had gotten up to $1,200 —
RUSH: Well, I don’t know how much is left. Gordon Liddy has bought it all up, from what I understand.
CALLER: Yeah, (unintelligible). He starts rolling the coins in his hand like the Caine Mutiny with the brass balls that, what’s-his-name — I can’t think of his name now —
RUSH: Humphrey Bogart.
CALLER: Yeah, there it is! But I just see the same thing, that this guy is doing this on purpose, you said that, he’s doing everything the opposite way. David Axelrod is no economist but I saw Robert Samuelson being interviewed last week. He said, until the next increase in employment every month is at least 400,000 to 500,000, and it has to go out, you know, for like around two years to get us back to where we were, the recession is not going to be over.
RUSH: Right, and the administration, the regime is saying that isn’t going to happen. The regime is saying that the unemployment rate’s not going to change significantly all the way through next year, through 2011. They’re getting everybody ready here for what appears to be now a permanent unemployment rate of 10%. That’s the new normal. Now, the GDP, gross domestic product, has to be more than 5% to even grow any job. That means every quarter economic growth has to be at least 5% before you create a single job in a sustained way. Also, this business of trying to give Obama cache by attaching Obama to Reagan. ‘Oh, yeah, Reagan and Obama, both the same thing, reduction in nuclear weapons.’ Yeah, but Reagan went about it a totally different way. Reagan went about it by building missile defenses and investing in conventional arms buildups. Obama’s tearing it all down. He’s tearing down missile defense systems, those that we pledged to the Poles and the Czechs, and he’s not doing anything to modernize any of our conventional weapons forces. He’s nowhere near Reagan in any way.
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RUSH: Well, you know, Obama might be a better actor than Reagan was. That would be the only comparison that I think would be valid.
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RUSH: Richard in San Antonio, Texas. Great to have you on the program. Hello.
CALLER: Yeah, hi, Rush. William F. Buckley dittos. I read a speech over the weekend by Ronald Reagan. He called the Soviet Union an evil empire. This president is calling America the evil empire in essence by his behavior and by the Russians shooting down — or possibly shooting down — that airliner over the weekend last week. I think this was in memory of the Katyn elimination of all though Polish officers in World War II, and I hope Americans think about that and think about this president who —
RUSH: Now, wait a minute. I haven’t heard the plane got shot down. I’ve heard the plane.
CALLER: Well, this is — this is theory, and I think it’s only theory, but I wouldn’t put it past the Russians because they did it with the KAO-007 shooting down that Korean jet going from Korea from JFK airport.
RUSH: Yeah, it ventured over their airspace.
CALLER: The Kamchatka Peninsula.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: And I think that Mr. Obama, President Obama is now in essence calling us the evil empire.
RUSH: Why? Because he thinks we’re the problem in the world?
CALLER: We’re the problem in the world. He’s apologized for the last 14 months, and he wants to, in essence, eliminate every single nuclear weapon that we have. They disintegrate at 5% annually anyway. An old Air Force person knows that, who works in nuclear weapons that I know, and our nuclear essence is being, in essence, verbally destroyed by this man and ultimately — if the military lets it happen — it will happen over the long term, and hopefully we can get him out of office by then.
RUSH: Well, we’ll see. Time will tell. As to that plane being shot down, there’s no evidence the plane was shot down. It is a really strange coincidence that a country Vladimir Putin despises because it’s no longer part of the Soviet bloc has a plane go down that has virtually every important leader in Poland from the president, his wife, to head of the military, the clandestine secret service. Ninety-six of them perished, and now they’re blaming the pilot for not responding properly to air traffic control who urged him not to land because the fog’s too thick. And they’re saying that the president of Poland, Mr. Kaczynski, suspected a plot because he was told the plane was ordered to divert to Moscow. He didn’t want to divert to Moscow. He wanted to go where they were going because he wanted to commemorate the slaughter of Polish soldiers 70 years ago in the Katyn Forest. (interruption)
Well, you depending on your avionics, Snerdley, you can land in the fog. This is a 25-year-old Russian Tupolev. I don’t know what upgrade they did but obviously it couldn’t land in the fog. Obviously it could not; it didn’t. I don’t know what the minimums are for this airport, and I don’t know what the minimums are for that particular aircraft, but apparently it couldn’t. The story we’re getting is the pilot made four attempts to land, dumping fuel each time. People think that might have indicated a mechanical problem. But Pravda is blaming the polish president because they say a pilot cannot refuse an air traffic control order, that the Polish president had to be told, ‘Mr. President, the tower is telling us we gotta divert to Moscow or Minsk,’ and they’re saying that Kaczynski didn’t want to do that because he thought it was a Russian trick to keep him from landing, so he forced the pilot to land. Therefore, they’re blaming him.