RUSH: Ah, this is great. I don’t know what to do with it, but this is great. I am holding here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers five printed pages of a Microsoft Word document that is supposedly a summary of the report circulating in the Kremlin today about what happened to the Malaysian airline flight.

And the “sources” for this report that the Kremlin has are the ChiComs. So ChiCom sources have prepared an analysis of what happened to the jet, and this is what Putin has, is what I’m told. And, in a nutshell, the US captured the plane and diverted it to Diego Garcia because there’s a passenger and cargo on board that we want. And that’s where it is.”

“A new report circulating in the Kremlin today prepared by the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces (GRU),” which is the new KGB, “states that Aerospace Defense Forces (VKO) experts remain ‘puzzled’ as to why the United States Navy ‘captured and then diverted’ a Malaysia Airlines civilian aircraft from its intended flight-path to their vast and highly-secretive Indian Ocean base located on the Diego Garcia atoll,” and then it goes on.

I haven’t read all five pages. I just got this halfway into the break. (laughing) This is supposedly now what happened. (laughing) Wait ’til CNN gets hold of this. It’s “official.” It’s official looking, and it is made to appear as though this is what Putin believes. This what’s circulating in the KGB, that the US Navy somehow captured that airplane, diverted it, and sent it to Diego Garcia.

We’d have to hide it there. Diego Garcia, I mean, it’s a small thing, but we’ve got a base there. You can see it from satellite. So it’s just another twist. Let me grab a call. We always try to go to the phones early on Open Line Friday. Richard, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Great to have you. Hello.

CALLER: Hello, Rush. Listen, am I the only one that thinks that Putin might be running a train that’s completely off the tracks and we’re dealing with a megalomaniac and a madman, with some of the things that he does? Why don’t they get a panel of experts of every shape like they have for this airline and size to analyze this guy and profile him?

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: The things that he does seems to me to be so unconventional, whether he’s on a horse with no shirt or any of the other things he’s done, it’s a statement in itself.

RUSH: You know —

CALLER: And this guy, I don’t think would care if he launched anything to end the world because he’d be in a bunker, and he’d think that he was the man that would go down in history as the one who did the most damage, and he’ll go down with the ship.

RUSH: What is different about Putin from any other Russian or Soviet leader?

CALLER: I’ve never seen anyone except Khrushchev put anybody in a box like he has.

RUSH: What do you mean?

CALLER: What I’m saying is, the aggression that he has hasn’t come out of the Soviet Union since they invaded Hungary in 1956.

RUSH: Oh, yes, it has. Khrushchev showing up at the United Nations banging the shoe, promising and threatening to enslave every American.

CALLER: But with the Cuban Missile Crisis, nothing came of it. I’m talking about the aggression. I’m not talking about the thumping of the chest or what we might do or how bellicose they are. This guy is actually acting upon things that haven’t been done since 1956. As far as history serves me. I could be wrong.

RUSH: All right. So you think Putin’s insane, off the rails, is dangerously imbalanced —

CALLER: Absolutely.

RUSH: — and he might do something really, really bad militarily? Destroy the world?

CALLER: Yeah, because he doesn’t care, because he’ll go down with the ship. He looks at it as probably the highlight of his career, as far as I’m concerned.

RUSH: I don’t think —

CALLER: Does anybody think that that possibility exists? What do you think?

RUSH: I think Putin is like every other Russian/Soviet leader.

CALLER: Mmm-hmmm.

RUSH: He’s a communist. He’s built on and devoted to expansionism.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: He wants to reestablish and rebuild the glory of the Soviet Union.

CALLER: Mmm-hmmm.

RUSH: He wants to cut every enemy down to size so that they’re not an enemy.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: I think the guy’s actually… He may be loony; I don’t know. But I think he’s also strategically brilliant. I hear all these people talk, “Here’s Putin running around fighting gators and running with his shirt off.” He’s only playing to the US low-information media. He’s making himself look harmless. He’s making himself look like he’s a cool dude. He’s not coming across like the old Soviet Union guys with the giant eyebrows, never smiling, standing front of a parade of missiles every May.

He doesn’t do any of that. He’s just running around rebuilding the Soviet Union and making it look like he’s a cool dude Look at all of his buddies. These Russian billionaires now own basketball teams in the NBA. They own the coolest, biggest yachts. They’re big friends with Paul Allen of Microsoft. I think what Putin’s doing actually kind of brilliant. He’s lulling everybody in this country.

There’s a poll out, I just saw it on Fox, that a vast majority of Americans don’t care what Putin is doing in the Crimea or in Ukraine. “It’s none of our business. Leave him alone.” They’re not threatened by the guy at all. I think that’s pretty brilliant on his part, given what he’s doing and what he’s attempting to do. These guys, they invaded Afghanistan. I mean, that was more recent that Hungary. You said 1956. They invaded Afghanistan.

CALLER: That’s true.

RUSH: They were threatening to nuke their own satellite countries if they didn’t stay. Brezhnev was famous for that. But I think Putin is a student of the American media and knows exactly how to play to it, and I think he knows exactly what to do. He’s running around with no shirt and making himself look like a hunk while our president is wearing mom jeans and can’t even throw a baseball in the first pitch at a Washington Nationals game that doesn’t embarrass everybody.

I think he knows exactly what he’s doing.

He knows that in this country masculinity is being stripped away, and masculinity is eroding. Masculinity is being impugned, laughed at, made fun of. What’s he doing? He’s looking like a real man; he’s looking like a real guy. Now, I think the shirt-off business, I think he’s miscalculating there. I don’t think most people react to him the way he’s hoping they will with that.

But nevertheless, he is succeeding in drawing a contrast between himself and our Alinskyite in the White House. Whether he’s off the rails, I think it’s just a wild guess. I don’t know the man. My guess is he wants to rule as much of the world as he can while he’s alive. I don’t think he he’s got suicidal tendencies at all. Blowing up the world and living in his bunker? He wants to run it. This is problem.

CALLER: (silence)

RUSH: See, folks? When I say something, there’s nothing left to be said. The caller was speechless when I finished. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to take every word out of his mouth call.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I think Vladimir Putin is on the move now because he knows that he has limited time. He’s never going to have this lack of opposition to what he’s doing in the United States. He’s got three years, and I think he’s gonna try to make the most of it, because I think he has accurately assessed two things. I think he’s accurately assessed the apathy toward him by the American people.

And I think he’s properly assessed the mettle of this Regime and administration. He has concluded that there’s no impetus here to stop him, no serious impetus to stop him. He doesn’t know who’s gonna be elected next, but he knows he’s got a little under three years here. By the way, there’s a story at TheHill.com today — I’ve got it here in the Stack — that reports are that Putin is indeed… Here it is, by Kristina Wong in TheHill.com:

“Away from the conflict in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin is quietly seeking a foothold in Latin America, military officials warn. To the alarm of lawmakers and Pentagon officials, Putin has begun sending navy ships and long-range bombers to the region for the first time in years. Russia’s defense minister says the country is planning bases in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, and just last week, Putin’s national security team met to discuss increasing military ties in the region.

“‘They’re on the march,’ Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-IN) said at a Senate hearing earlier this month. ‘They’re working the scenes where we can’t work. And they’re doing a pretty good job.’ Gen. James Kelly, commander of US Southern Command said there has been a ‘noticeable uptick in Russian power projection and security force personnel’ in Latin America.” It’s not a secret what Putin’s doing. Nicaragua’s a former client state.

Venezuela is wide open, with a massive student revolution taking place, 57% unemployment. There is nonexistent economy. It’s made to order, and it’s in the top 10 oil producing nations. It is one of the top 10 oil-producing nations in the world. It’s just sitting there. Now, in the old days, when the United States mattered, when we had adults — and I’m not exaggerating — we would have CIA agents and others in there

We would be attempting to forge an allied relationship with the malcontents in Venezuela, and the same thing in Cuba. But now we’re living under a Regime that’s just said the Monroe Doctrine no longer applies, which means anybody from any part of the world could come into our hemisphere and take whatever they want. We’re not gonna really do anything to stop ’em.

Putin’s on the march.

He’s got three years with these guys.

Here’s another thing you have to remember: Sometimes it’s hard to keep this in mind, but it’s very important. For people like Putin or whoever — the mullahs in Iran, for Bashar Assad, for anybody, any of these tyrants — they have not truly accepted that we have become a paper tiger. Their history with the United States means they’re deathly afraid of us, because of our past.

We have won every war we’ve gotten into, whether we were the one started it or not. We kick butt everywhere we’ve been challenged, and we have spread liberty and freedom, and there has been no stopping us. Superpower? We’re it, and they remember it. So even though we now have a president unlike we’ve ever had before… We’ve never had this kind of active pacifist, if you will. So they see what they’re dealing with now.

But they also know, because of their own intelligence guided by experience, what this country’s capable of. They’re rolling the dice that this country just isn’t interested anymore, as it used to be, in such things as superpower status and external threats. We’re more concerned with whether or not gay marriage is respected around the world. We’re more concerned with whether or not civil rights, as leftist activists define it, are happening around the world.

We’re more concerned with these silly social things than the way they look at them. You know, Putin’s looking around say, “These people are really, really gonna legalize pot? It’s gonna make it even easier for us.” So outwardly, Putin I think is looking at this like he knows he’s got three years with Obama, and that’s a green light for him. But every one of these guys — Putin, Ahmadinejad, whoever — knows what this country is capable of simply because of what we’ve done in the past.

You know, once something has been, it can easily be again. And they will always have very near the front of their mind that if the American people are sufficiently rallied — sufficiently threatened, sufficiently angered — they will at some point come out of their stupor and rise up and say, “Enough is enough!” That’s their experience with us. But as long as the current Regime is in the Oval Office and running things, they think they’ve got clear sailing.

But they’re always gonna be guarded about how they go about it. They can’t afford to be totally confident that we are seriously squandering superpower status. They cannot ever act confidently on that. They can look at what the reality is day to day and act on that, but we simply have the biggest military in the world, and we can simply, if we want to, project power everywhere in the world more than they can. So they have to keep that in check.

But in the meantime… (interruption) Well, that’s another thing. Well, we haven’t done it yet, but Putin can say, “Oh, Obama wants to cut the military down to pre-World War II size? How can I help?” Now, the Regime will tell you that they want to cut the military back down to pre-WW2 ’cause I don’t need this conventional force. It’s the Twenty-First Century, remember.

“Why, our enemies are not supposed to invade with people! It’s supposed to be done with computers and war games and so we don’t need it. We don’t need a conventional, infantry, boots-on-the-ground force anymore. We don’t need all these fighter planes and bombers because the video games have shown us we can do all this with missiles and so forth. So we don’t need all that.” Meanwhile, Putin and the rest of these people, particularly the ChiComs, ramp up.

The ChiComs have over a billion people, their population. That’s a heck of an army if they wanted to try to assemble it. It’s a lot of people. They can incur severe casualties and not even feel it. Yeah, it might help them, in fact, to incur severe casualties on a conventional battlefield. So this stuff is serious. It’s intricate. And remember, we have people leading our country who do not see it. They don’t remember America victorious.

They don’t remember it in their own lives, but they can, of course, read the history. But they resent a militarily powerful and successful America. And don’t think Putin and these people don’t know this, and don’t think they’ll fully exploit it. Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, are in our own hemisphere. Right there it is: Democrats on Senate committees are warning what Putin is preparing. It’s right there.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s Christine in Naples, Florida. Hi, Christine. I’m glad you called on Open Line Friday. Welcome to the program.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thank you so much. Listen, my husband and I listen to your show just about every day.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: We’re self-employed, so we keep a radio going. Yesterday, he had to run into the hardware store, and you played a song from Putin about Obama, and he wanted Barry to grow a set. I was in hysterics waiting for him to come out of the store, and I couldn’t get through yesterday to ask you to play it again.

RUSH: I’ll gladly play it again, but I have to make an observation. I just want to point out that I’ve always maintained that this program increases productivity. And you just admitted it. You and your husband are self-employed; you have the radio on all day.

CALLER: Absolutely.

RUSH: You work better. It makes you happier and smarter.

CALLER: And we stay informed. But we try to keep it lighthearted, so when humor can be injected, we are all about it. So if you could, at some point in time before your show is ended today, play that song again, I would really appreciate it.

RUSH: I’ll play it now. It’s Open Line Friday.

CALLER: Oh, thank you.

RUSH: You say it; we play it. Here you go, Vladimir Putin. Come Back, Obama, When You Grow a Pair. (song plays) The Red Army Chorus, with Vladimir Putin, the vocal interpretation here. (song continues) Red Army Chorus there. (song continues) Vladimir Putin and the Russian Red Army Hockey Team Chorus, and Come Back, Barry, When You Grow a Pair.