RUSH: Did you know that Mikhail Gorbachev is a Christian? Folks, this news has the potential — you’ll never see it, but it has the potential — to really upset the left. Gorbachev! Again, for those of you who are under 30, like I said yesterday… In fact, Cookie had a great idea yesterday. It would never happen. Cookie told me that she was really moved by my opening hour monologue on American exceptionalism.
She said, “You know what? You ought to condense that into an op-ed and submit it to the New York Times. There has to be the opposing point of view in the New York Times. They’ll give Putin op-ed space; they ought to give it to you.” They never would. (interruption) No, no, no. Snerdley, they wouldn’t do it. I started yesterday by saying those of you under 30 have no idea.
If you had been born 30 or 40 years ago, something like the leader of Russia or the Soviet Union writing an op-ed in the New York Times trashing our president and our country, would have not been tolerated. It would have been an outrage. It would have been a major news story. Yesterday it’s a ho-hummer — and, by the same token, if you are 35 or 40 years old, you really do not know much about Mikhail Gorbachev.
I mean, you know the name, but you don’t know the guy. For example, you don’t know what a Gorbasm is, unless you or your parents are regular listeners here. But Mikhail Gorbachev was the last of the living, breathing Soviet dictators. Jeane Kirkpatrick, the late great foreign policy specialist, I once attended a lecture she gave when I was in Sacramento at the University of California Davis, and it was a lecture to the students. UC Davis was a satellite university for Moscow.
She said in her lecture that Gorbachev, to Reaganites and conservatives, was no different than any other Soviet leader. The media in that day tried to present Gorbachev as something brand-new and different and not your typical communist and so forth, Kirkpatrick said, “The only difference between Mikhail Gorbachev and previous Soviet leaders is, he is alive,” and the students in that lecture hall at UC-Davis just erupted and hooted and they were mad as hell at her, ’cause they loved Gorbachev.
The media tried to get everybody in America to love Gorbachev and hate Reagan. Reagan was the dangerous cowboy. Reagan was the irresponsible, stupid dunce with his finger on the nuclear button, and he wanted to nuke the world, and it was Gorbachev who was the savior. Gorbachev was the reasonable leader. Gorbachev was going to save us all from Reagan blowing up the world. This is how it was all portrayed — and then the Soviet Union fell apart, ’cause of what Gorbachev tried to do.
He tried to have it both ways. He tried to introduce limited freedom for the citizens of the Soviet Union while at the same time maintaining a communist structure. But the cat was out of the bag. The people of Soviet Union had learned that they’d be lied to about life in America because they finally got videocassettes of such shows as Dallas, and they saw that the portrayal of America they’d always been told was a lie, and they wanted that.
They found blue jeans, and they wanted those.
The Soviet Union was a Third World country with a first-world military, and they used it in an expansive, aggressive way. They were a genuine threat, and they had to be contained. It was Reagan and his, well, “policies,” for lack of a better word, which ended up defeating Soviet communism. Not all of communism, but Soviet communism, and there were battles between the Soviets and the ChiComs for leadership of the communist world. Soviet communism plummeting was a big deal. The Berlin Wall came down.
And after, Gorbachev became big hero. He was always a big hero, and Gorbachev understood the West — and the first thing Gorbachev did after the Berlin Wall came down was to become an environmentalist wacko. He started a foundation called the Green Cross or some such thing, which was designed to save the world from global warming. So the American leftists just glommed onto Gorbachev, and they loved him. He ended up being hated in the USSR after the fall.
There was an assassination attempt against him, and he blamed the forces close to Boris Yeltsin for that. Boris Yeltsin was too drunk most of the time to run on assassination attempt, but he could order one. I met Gorbachev. For those of you who’ve not seen, he had a big birthmark on his head, forehead, and to be honest, if you look at that birthmark back in the 1980s, you could see the eastern seaboard, of the United States. You could see the East Coast. You could see Cape Cod.
You could see Maine, and you could see the Florida peninsula in that birthmark. I swear, all during the two terms of Reagan that birthmark expanded. It was typical Soviet expansionism, and we had a little fun with his first arrival in the United States for a summit with Reagan, in Washington. That’s when the first known Gorbasm took place is when he landed and got off the plane. The left in Washington, the media, they were orgasmic because finally the man who was gonna save us from nuclear devastation had arrived!
It didn’t work out the way they wanted. I finally met Gorbachev. I met him at a birthday party, the 80th birthday party for George H. W. Bush at Reliant Stadium in Houston, and we had a picture taken standing next to each other. We were wearing almost the identical suit, gray suits — and when the picture appeared on my website, that birthmark was on my head. It’s amazing how that happened. Gorbachev loved George H. W. Bush. This was when “Poppy,” that’s his nickname, parachuted.
This was a Saturday. On Sunday, he parachuted out on his 80th birthday and it was very windy so he had to do a buddy jump. He couldn’t do it alone. Gorbachev was right there applauding. Anyway, the news hit that “Mikhail Gorbachev, the last communist leader of the Soviet Union, has acknowledged his Christian faith for the first time, paying a surprise visit to pray at the tomb of St Francis of Assisi.
“Accompanied by his daughter Irina, Mr. Gorbachev spent half an hour on his knees in silent prayer at the tomb. His arrival in Assisi was described as ‘spiritual perestroika’ by La Stampa, the Italian newspaper. ‘St Francis is, for me, the alter Christus, the other Christ,’ said Mr. Gorbachev. ‘His story fascinates me and has played a fundamental role in my life,’ he added.
“Mr. Gorbachev’s surprise visit confirmed decades of rumors that, although he was forced to publicly pronounce himself an atheist,” while he was a communist leader, “he was in fact a Christian, and casts a meeting with Pope John Paul II in 1989 in a new light. Mr. Gorbachev, 77, was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church and his parents were Christians. In addition, the parents of his wife Raisa were deeply religious and were killed during the Second World War for having religious icons in their home.”
I’d like you to think about something here, but I’ve gotta take a break, so I’ll pose it when we come back.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, the “Mikhail Gorbachev Admits he is a Christian” story is actually from 2008. It’s a UK Telegraph story, and I don’t know how many of you knew it. It’s a five-year-old story. That’s not the point, though. Here’s something I would like to raise, something to think about. A “closet” Christian pretending to be an atheist. Now, by the way, he was a typical Soviet leader. He had to be to survive. But it was Gorbachev who did come up with perestroika and glasnost, and those were two policies.
Perestroika was openness, and glasnost. They were characterized as reforms to modernize the Soviet Union that were oriented a little bit in freedom and liberty, not much, but it was a closed society. This was to open it up. A lot of it was for PR. Here’s a man whose wife’s parents were killed because they had religious icons in their home. Do you think it’s a coincidence…? Here’s my point: Is it a coincidence that the leader of the Soviet Union at the time of its demise was a closet Christian?
Do you think that’s a coincidence? His wife’s parents were killed because of religious icons in their home. Russian Orthodox, is what he was, or is. By the way, after that photo that Gorbachev and I took, the birthmark was removed. They grafted skin from one of the buttocks — no, from his back — and they got rid of the birthmark. Anyway, this story popped in 2008. I don’t know how many leftists remember it or even knew it happened in 2008.
I mean, this guy was everybody on the left’s favorite Soviet thug, and now they learn he was a Christian, and then they’re gonna learn that this is the guy that they were praising for ending the Cold War. Reagan had nothing to do with it, folks. If you weren’t alive back then, Reagan had nothing to do with it. It was all Gorbachev. Gorbachev saw the Soviet Union could not continue as it was. He was a closet Christian disguised as an atheist leading the Soviet Union during its demise, praising Pope John Paul II.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, the UK Telegraph story in which Mikhail Gorbachev, in 2008, admitted that he is a Christian. Let me get the exact date on that. That was March 19, 2008. Well, on March 24th, five days later, Gorbachev denied it. This is why it didn’t get a lot of play. Gorbachev said, he’s not a closet Catholic. He’s not a Christian, all of this is lies, and he claimed that he remained an atheist.
He said, “To sum up and avoid any misunderstandings, let me say that I have been and remain an atheist.” Devout atheist. That’s why the Drive-Bys didn’t report it, because it didn’t last but five days. The UK Telegraph claimed he was a closet Christian, Catholic. He denies it five days later and had the birthmark removed, and this day he claims to be a closet atheist.