RUSH: I’m looking for Thomas “Loopy” Friedman in the audio sound bites, and it is number 9. I want to play for you a sound bite.
This guy is the foreign policy columnist, the foreign policy expert of the Democrat-media complex writing at the New York Times — Thomas L. “Loopy” Friedman — and last night he was on Anderson Cooper 135 on CNN. He breaks down! (sobbing) “He’s worried about the future of this country more than at any other time because Republicans won’t even impeach Trump! (sniffling) He doesn’t know what to do! He’s at his wits’ end.” I want you to listen to this. I want you to listen to his voice and ask yourself if this sounds like somebody who thinks he’s winning.
Here’s the question from Anderson Cooper: “Alexander Vindman, who served two decades in the military, has shrapnel in his body from an IED attack…” That’s more evidence why we cannot disagree. Why, he’s still running around with shrapnel! He was serving in Iraq. (Snort!) Well, that ought to disqualify him right there. Every damn one of you people hated the war in Iraq. This guy ought to be a war criminal to you! Vindman ought to be one of the cabal that conducted this illegal “Bush war”!
Friedman, Anderson Cooper, every damn one of these people tried to destroy the Iraq war effort. Now they’re praising and protecting and claiming a participant in the Iraq war is unassailable ’cause he’s still carrying shrapnel. “Yeah, so you leave him alone,” they’re saying. So this is part of the question. “Alexander Vindman, who served two decades in the military, has shrapnel in his body from an IED attack while serving in Iraq. He’s being accused by President Trump’s allies as being disloyal to America over his testimony in the impeachment inquiry.
“Does this only go downhill from here? I’m not sure how much lower it can get!” So Anderson Cooper’s asking (summarized), “Is this it, Thomas? We got ’em now, right? This is so horrible, so rotten, attacking this military guy.” These are people that hate the military. These are people that suspect the military. I’m talking about Anderson Cooper and the left wing, the media. They’ve got no reverence for the military unless somebody there is gonna be doing their bidding, which think Vindman is. Here’s “Loopy” Friedman’s response.
FRIEDMAN: I worry about the future of my country today more than any time in my life. What Trump engaged in was an impeachable offense — and instead of calling that out, getting to the bottom of it, and instead of attacking that, they’re attacking the process and the very system of our government. This is so dangerous. This is so despicable. They are disgusting and hurting our country. (pounding desk) These people won’t make the smallest sacrifice, ’cause Donald Trump might not tweet them or they might not get invited for his next golf round? They are disgusting, they are shameful, and they are hurting our country.
RUSH: (sniveling) “He’s so upset (sobbing) he’s pounding the desk!” Does this sound like somebody winning to you? Does this sound like somebody who thinks they’re going downhill? This guy’s frustrated because the Republicans won’t do their work for ’em! This guy’s upset because the Republicans won’t join them to get rid of their own president! You need the American people, Mr. Friedman. That’s how you’re gonna get the Republicans. If you can’t get the American people behind this, then you’re gonna bomb out — and so far, you’re bombing!
You don’t have the American people because this isn’t an impeachable offense. What’s despicable is the way the Democrats are using this process and monkeying around with it, denying due process, not releasing transcripts, not permitting any American to hear what’s actually going on in his room two floors above street level in the House. (sniveling) “This is disgusting, hurting our country. These people won’t make the smallest sacrifice ’cause Donald Trump might not invite them to play golf.”
What’s on Friedman’s mind? He’s upset that he’s not been invited to play golf! This is really what he thinks is going on? “Republicans are not gonna abandon Trump because they might not be invited to play golf with Trump ever again!” And yet these are the people who live and die by the various cocktail parties they are invited to and host. But regardless, I just wanted you to hear it ’cause he’s practically crying. He’s pounding the table. He’s upset the Republicans won’t do what you can’t. They have tried for three years now to separate Donald Trump from his voters (sobbing), “And they haven’t succeeded.
“So they want the Republicans to do it (sniffling) for the sake of our country.”
No, they want Republicans to do it so Democrats can get all power back. These are the people that our despicable. And see? Right there, flash evidence of the partisan divide — and it’s only gonna get worse as Pelosi continues down this slow, dribbling hill of hers that she’s made.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: You know what I was thinking about at the top of the hour? I was thinking about Thomas Friedman, thinking about how unhappy Thomas Friedman is. Now, Thomas Friedman, columnist extraordinaire, foreign policy guru, expert, whatever, New York Times, should be happy as pigs in slop. Everything’s going their way, right?
See, it actually isn’t. This is the great thing. Friedman is glaring evidence how they’re not winning and they know it. And I think a positive mental attitude is always preferable and much more productive than pessimism and negativism. Pessimism, negativism, are easy. They’re seductive, easy to fall into them both. Friedman’s miserable, and I was thinking about why, not just that they’re failing.
I mean, folks, I’ve tried to tell you, one of the things that’s just driving ’em nuts is, as Victor Davis Hanson said in yesterday’s column, these are the best and brightest, in their own minds they’re the best and brightest. They’re smarter than all of us. They’re more qualified. I mean, it’s not close, they’re leaps and bounds ahead of us in their own minds. We are genuine subordinates to them. We are genuinely inferior to them.
They have a superiority complex, and it’s not because of merit or achievement. It’s ’cause of connections, labels, titles, any number of other things. Friedman’s really unhappy, which is a very, very instructive moment here. He’s unhappy like they all are, ’cause they can’t believe that Trump is still there. They’ve launched everything they’ve got.
They’ve used every brain cell all of them have combined, and they haven’t dented Donald Trump. They haven’t moved public opinion. They have not convinced Trump’s supporters to abandon him. They’re looking at themselves as abject failures, but they don’t see themselves as failures. They see you as suborn idiots. But nevertheless they’re miserable and they’re at their wits’ end.
Trump was supposed to have quit instead of enduring all this. Trump was supposed to have resigned. Trump was supposed to have seen how hopeless they were making his presidency and circumstance, and he was supposed to quit. He was supposed to sue for peace. He was supposed to beg them to stop this, let him go, leave his family alone, leave poor Flynn alone, leave Manafort alone, these guys didn’t do anything, leave ’em alone. I’ll leave if they’ll stop. That’s what they’re expecting. They’re still expecting it.
But at the root of it is they literally can’t believe they can’t pull this off, i.e., getting rid of Trump. Now, when you boil all this down, if you synthesize Friedman — and he’s a great microcosm for all of them — if you trip away all of the dressing and the distractions, Thomas Friedman is miserable because he’s not relevant. He’s miserable and unhappy because he doesn’t matter, and there’s no greater source of misery in his world than not mattering.
Thomas Friedman could be the biggest dope in the world, but because he is the foreign policy columnist at the New York Times, i.e., the label, he can write as he does the stupidest and most ignorant things and be regarded as a genius without having to do anything other than write his columns praising the Chinese in the New York Times, or now ripping Donald Trump. He’s miserable because he doesn’t matter. His side lost, and he’s got no place where he matters. His New York Times columns and his New York Times paper have not been able to get rid of Donald Trump. His pals at CNN and the Washington Post have not been able to get rid of Donald Trump.
Now, when was Thomas Friedman happy? This was the real point that I want to make to you. Obama was smart. Obama knew the egos of the sycophants in the media that loved him. The dirty little secret is that Obama never liked them. He was always suspicious. They’re members of the press! And they could at any time conceivably turn on him.
Now, that was very unlikely, but I’ll guarantee you Obama is like most other left-wing authoritarians. They do not like the press at all. They don’t like prying eyes even if they are supposedly friendly. So Obama ran a really, really smart operation to bring all these people in. And I’ll never forget it. Early on in his administration, the first term, Obama makes big deal about having miniature summits at the White House in the East Room.
A summit in all four corners and then two more along the longest walls in the room. In one corner was the employment group. And then the health care group. And then the stimulus group. And over here is some other group doing some other little afternoon’s work on policy. And Obama announced this. It was all over television. It was televised.
He would bring these people in, they included Thomas Friedman in the employment group. There were literally five or six people, maybe more, around a table in one of the corners of the East Room, and Friedman was one of the participants in the employment group. What were these people doing? Well, I’ll tell you in a minute.
Over here you had the defense group and over there the health care group and whatever policies were of the day. You had a media figure in every one of these workshops is what they were called. They were workshops where the problems of America were gonna be solved in an afternoon, my friends. That’s when Thomas Friedman was happy, when he was included in one of those. He mattered, the president of the United States wanted his input and work on how to create jobs. It was a beautiful thing.
And CNN’s covering this thing! They didn’t go wall-to-wall on it, but they checked in with it at various strategic points in the afternoon. So the thing starts with lunch at around 11:30 or noon, and then 1 o’clock they get serious and all the groups break up and they go to their various workstations in the East Room.
And every hour or so Obama would come back into the room, I don’t know where he went, probably practice putting or something, he’d leave the room and all these groups of sycophants, butt kissers that he had brought in to fix health care and fix the job situation and fix the deficit and fix whatever the groups were, he’d come in every hour and check in with ’em, ask ’em how they were doing. CNN would televise it.
I’ll never forget when he got to Friedman’s group, Friedman was beaming. Thomas Friedman was beaming, he was smiling, he was so thrilled to be included in the work group here on creating jobs. And at 5 o’clock it ended. And Obama ended it with great fanfare.
He’d made a couple of trips in the afternoon to each one of the groups. “Hey, boys, how y’all doing here? Got any good ideas for me on the employment circumstance? Got any good ideas me on health care over here?”
“Yes, Mr. President, we do.” And these people were actually doing it. They were sitting there talking with themselves, sharing their brilliant ideas with one another on jobs and health care and whatever. It was the biggest sham I’ve ever seen, because none of it mattered, none of it was real, Obama was not gonna listen to one thing these people suggested, plus this is not how you fix problems.
But at the end of this day, the media did their job and pointed out how Obama had done something never before. He included so many different minds, so many different levels of input to deal with jobs, to deal with health care. And the image was created that in a four-and-a-half hour afternoon at the White House, many of these gravely important issues had been solved. (imitating Obama) “Today we came up with a lot of good ideas, many of them we can implement very soon on creating jobs and returning full employment.”
I’m sitting here and I’m laughing myself silly. A bunch of eggheads sitting down talking to each other in an exaggerated faculty lounge. “We’re gonna fix health care! We’re gonna fix jobs! We’re gonna fix the defense budget!” They were gonna do whatever they were gonna do in 4-1/2 hours. This was classic. This is exactly what happens at the faculty lounge at a major university. They get around, they chat among themselves, and talk about how stupid everybody else is that’s actually doing work.
They sit there and they write and they reflect and they share, and at the end of the day, they think, “Man, are we smart! Man, are we brilliant! We just solved all these problems.” They didn’t do diddly-squat. But at the end of the day, Obama made ’em feel like they mattered. Oh, were they important — and it would be impossible to ever criticize Obama after that! Furthermore, the reports then started coming that major progress was being made on unemployment, major progress was being made on the deficit, whatever it was.
So you talk about a giant illusion. But it was not even that. This was Obama using people for 4-1/2 hours making them think that he was interested in their ideas and might actually implement some, and they end the day thinking they really mattered. “This guy is really smart to consult me. This guy knows who to talk to.” So they were made fools of, and they looked happy being made fools of. But Obama made ’em feel like they mattered. He made ’em feel like they were relevant.
He made ’em feel like he thought that they were brilliant. He made ’em feel like he needed ’em. He made ’em feel like he couldn’t do this on his own without them. So he owned them. For the next eight years, he owned them. Now, let me ask you this. What happened to jobs during Obama’s eight years? (Raspberry!) What happened to the economy in Obama’s at years? (Raspberry!) What were we told? “This is a new era of decline! The United States’ best days are behind with us. We’re here to manage the decline.”
You mean this is what these eggheads put together in 4-1/2 hours? This is it? See by the time the next week rolled around, nobody even remembered this stupid afternoon of summits except the participants and the media, who thought, “It was just… Oh, my God. It was utopia in there! There was no end! It was so… (joyfully) Oh, God, I can’t contain myself, how exciting it was!” It didn’t matter a hill of beans. After eight years of Obama, I’ll guarantee you not a single idea was ever discussed in that room.
Not that ever got implemented, anyway. But even if it had, this is not how you solve problems in America. America’s major problems were solved in 4-1/2 hours ’cause guys like Thomas Friedman got to help. (Gasp!) So now where’s Thomas Friedman? He doesn’t matter. Trump is not listening to him. Trump doesn’t care. Trump has even canceled the subscription to his newspaper at the White House now. The New York Times is not even delivered there! Trump doesn’t even read Friedman to find out what to do.
Friedman has been part of the cabal trying to get rid of Trump; they haven’t succeeded. Trump is still happy. Every day, he’s doing his job. He’s tweeting, he’s laughing at ’em, he’s making fun of ’em — and they can’t touch him, and it infuriates them, ’cause it was just ten years ago they were all at the White House for 4-1/2 hours solving America’s problems the way liberals do it: Talking to each other, celebrating their own intelligence, insulting everybody else, and working in a corner table with a bunch of ideas on paper.
“America was made great again!”
Really?
What happened in the eight years?
It took the election of Donald Trump to revitalize American employment, manufacturing, economic output. Obama’s little seminars, his little focus group, whatever they were called — work groups — what did they matter? (Raspberry!) Again. But that’s when Thomas Friedman was happy. That’s when he mattered. Now, none of ’em matter. They’re all on the outside, and the president’s laughing at ’em and mocking ’em and making fun of ’em and insulting them — and these are the best and brightest in our country!
These are the people that make the country work. These are the people in journalism who protect the First Amendment. “Oh, my God! This guy Trump is dangerous.” They’re the best and brightest, they’re the smartest, they solve problems in 4-1/2 hours in the Obama East Room — and they can’t get rid of Donald Trump. (Gasp!) They can’t get rid of Ivanka. They can’t get rid of Jared Kushner, for crying out loud. They can’t get rid of anybody! They know they’re not winning, folks — and now the best and brightest includes some guy who is a walking disaster waiting to happen and joke, Adam Schiff?
Think positive, folks.