RUSH: Just one more thing I want to do. Play a little game. I mentioned to you in the opening monologue of the first hour, about an hour ago, that our good friend and colleague Brit Hume at Fox News thinks I went a little overboard in comparing the Democrats to the Iranians in terms of their vitriolic comments about President Trump and our action against General Soleimani. It happened last night. Shannon Bream was doing her Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream show, and she had on the Fox News Channel senior political analyst…
Do I need a title like this? You know, all these people have titles: “senior political analyst,” “senior political director correspondent,” “chief congressional correspondent House Office Building.” Do I need a title? Probably not. Just my name tells everybody everything they need to know, right? I don’t need a title. Anyway, these guys all have titles. (interruption) Well, Trump is the de facto head of the Republican Party. This is Trump’s party.
I mean, I might have been at one point the titular head, but, no, this is Trump’s party. Look, one of the reasons there are titles… I must be honest. One of the reasons there are titles is that’s how people get raises. That’s how corporations categorize pay scales. (Snort!) You can sit in there and laugh all you want, but every corporate demon that is listening to me knows full well what I’m talking about. You’ve got senior vice president, you got area vice president, you got senior vice president of vice presidents.
You got, depending on how large the corporation is, an interminable number of titles, and getting a new title (i.e., promotion) is one of the ways they categorize compensation and pay raises. So, let’s see. Brit Hume here is senior political analyst. That means some people are not senior. They’re just regular political analysts. There’s inferior political analyst. There is trainee political analyst, intern political analyst. But Brit Hume here is senior political analyst at Fox News.
Shannon Bream asked him about the death of the Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani. To set things up, she introduced and played a clip of me from yesterday’s program.
BREAM: I want to play a little bit of Rush Limbaugh today talking about the reaction from the left in a number of quarters to the death of Qassem Soleimani, who is unmistakably responsible for the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of Americans, thousands of other people of all ethnicities and backgrounds, but including, yes, American lives. Here’s what Rush Limbaugh said today in talking with the president about reaction…
BEGIN ARCHIVE CLIP
RUSH: [I]n the past two or three days since the attack on Soleimani, you literally have the Democrat Party and elements of that party openly supporting Iran, an enemy of the United States, openly supporting the terrorist actions of that country, and this is a country that beheads homosexuals and transgenders –
THE PRESIDENT: Yeah.
RUSH: — and has no human rights for the very constituency the Democrat Party claims to represent.
END ARCHIVE CLIP
RUSH: I don’t know what’s arguable about that. I mean, the Democrats… All of these little Millennials and these AOC types, they do think that Iran is superior. I’ve got story right here: “Ocasio-Cortez Accuses ‘Monster’ Trump of Engaging in ‘War Crime’ over Iran Threats.” You know, Trump has threatened to hit their “cultural sites.” They don’t have any cultural sites! Cultural sites are military installations. We already got rid of their cultural sites. It happened a long time ago.
I’m half jesting here, but the point is that here you’ve got Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accusing Trump of being a monster for engaging in war crimes in Iran. Another headline: “AOC Likes Tweet from Russian State Media Claiming Iran Doesn’t Target Civilians.” You know, so our good buddies, the Russians, are out tweeting (paraphrased), “I don’t know what Trump’s talking about. Iran does not target civilians.” (Snort!) They’re only the Middle Eastern state sponsor of terrorism, and by definition it attacks civilians.
What the hell do you think a suicide bomb is! But here’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez out liking and retweeting the Russian tweet that Iran doesn’t kill civilians. So this is not an out-of-bounds thing to say, and the Iranians do… If they identify homosexuals or transgenders, they’re dead. You talk about people having to live in the closet someplace in Iran? This is no joke about this, and the very people in this country who support all of that — these expanded lifestyles — are out there praising Iran? It’s just ignorant.
So, anyway, here’s Brit Hume’s response to that sound bite…
HUME: The trouble with that is that it’s… (chortles) It’s like a lot of stuff you hear, is he has the point in the sense that the Democratic Party does not seem to be at all happy, broadly speaking, about the death of this terrorist mastermind whose departure from this earth will weaken Iran and its terrorist ambitions. But at the same time, it is not quite fair to say that the Democratic Party is openly supporting Iran. That’s too strong. They have been weak in supporting our president, to be sure, but openly supporting Iran? Too strong.
RUSH: Well, I…. (sigh) Maybe the tweets that I saw over the weekend I didn’t see — and maybe the caterwauling from elected Democrats over the weekend that I saw, maybe they didn’t happen. I just don’t pull this stuff out of my top hat. I don’t even have one of those. I don’t pull it out of my back pocket and just throw it out there. In fact, this isn’t anything new!
Back when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the president of Iran, you couldn’t tell the difference between what he was saying about Bush and what the Democrats were saying about Bush. Anyway, we thought we would play a little game here. We’re gonna go side-by-side, A-B comparison, and you tell me if I may be overstating that. Up first is Javad Zarif. He is the Iranian foreign minister. He was on CNN this morning, said this about Trump’s warning to Iran if they attacked the United States…
ZARIF: (whispering) Attacking cultural sites is a war crime. But has he made U.S. more secure? Do Americans feel more secure? Are Americans welcome today in this region? Do they feel welcome?
RUSH: And here is Democrat presidential candidate Fauxcahontas Warren…
WARREN: (haltingly) We now have a president who is tweeting threats of war crimes. We’ve had to pull all of the Americans out of the area, all the civilians. This is not making America safer.
RUSH: Iranian or Democrat? You decide. (interruption) What? Don’t… (interruption) What you saying? (interruption) Oh, you’re trying to say you can’t figure it out, may need some more time on this? Well, okay, here is Javad Zarif (impression), “Attacking cultural sites is a war crime, but he’s made U.S. more secure? I don’t think so. Do Americans feel more secure? Are Americans welcome today in this region? Do they feel welcome?” When the hell…?
When I went on my troop visit to Afghanistan, I flew over and landed in Dubai, spent a couple of days there recalibrating time zones and all that, got on a U.N. plane and could not fly over Iran. Now, this is back in the early 2000s. We could not fly over Iran because they were threatening to shoot down anything that wasn’t theirs. Feel safe in the region! Nobody going to Afghanistan in ways I had to get there…
We had to fly around Iran, up through Pakistan and other places to get there. It added hours to the trip. Feel secure in the region? Okay. So Fauxcahontas (impression), “We now have a president who’s tweeting threats of war crimes.” It’s exactly what the Iranians say. Let’s do another one. Here’s Bernie Sanders last night on CNN, Anderson Cooper. Question: “Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut tweeted that targeting cultural sites is what terrorists do. Do you agree with it?”
SANDERS: It is a war crime, and to be learning from the Taliban about destroying cultural sites is unbelievable. And the idea of spending trillions of dollars more on an endless war in Iran is, to me, just beyond comprehension.
RUSH: Okay. Here’s another sound bite. Is this a Democrat or is this an Iranian?
ZARIF: He’s prepared to commit war crimes. He has killed people of this region. He has spent a trillion dollars. He said that, uhh, U.S. had, uh, wasted $7 trillion in our region. He has added another trillion. Is the United States more secure today because of that?
RUSH: So who is that? Is that a Democrat or is that…? (interruption) No, you’re wrong.
It’s not a Democrat, although may as well be. That again is Javad Zarif, he’s the Iranian foreign minister. Crazy Bernie (imitation) “It’s a war crime to be learning from the Taliban about destroying cultural sites. Unbelievable. The idea of spending trillions of dollars more on an endless war in Iran is beyond comprehension.”
Here comes the Iranian. (imitation) “He is prepared to commit war crimes. He has killed people in this region. He has spent a trillion dollars. He said he wasted $7 trillion in our region. Added another trillion. Is the U.S. more secure today because of that?” You can’t tell the difference here other than the accents. I mean, nobody would ever confuse Crazy Bernie from being from Tehran. And one more. Here is Pencil Neck on December 18th on the floor of the House during debate on the articles of impeachment.
SCHIFF: When Donald J. Trump was sworn in on January 20th, 2017, he repeated these words. I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the president of the United States and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. Has he lived up to that sacred obligation? Has he honored his oath of office? Has he preserved, protected, and defended the Constitution of the United States? The uncontested evidence provides the simple yet tragic answer: He has not. In America, no one is above the law.
RUSH: The uncontested evidence? There isn’t any evidence. There never has been any evidence for any allegation these people have mounted. At any rate, so that’s Adam Schiff. And here now is the next voice, tell me is this an Iranian or is this a Democrat?
ZARIF: We are a law-abiding people. We’re not lawless like President Trump. He is destroying the U.S. Constitution. He’s destroying the U.S. political process. He’s destroying the rule of law in the United States.
RUSH: You tell me. That, again, is the Iranian foreign minister Zavi Zarif or whatever, you tell me the difference between these guys and the Democrats. You can’t. In the case of Schiff and this guy, that’s almost word-for-word verbatim. “We in Iran are law-abiding people. We are not lawless like President Trump. He is destroying the Constitution.” Like he cares. “He is destroying the U.S. political process. He is destroying the rule of law in the United States.” Exactly what Schiff and his cronies are out saying.
There isn’t any difference, and it’s not a stretch to claim that the Democrats sound like an echo chamber of the Iranians, and it’s not new. Here, one more before we go to the break. This is kind of unreal. CBS This Morning correspondent Elizabeth Palmer is interviewing the Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. She says: “There are reports that the Supreme Leader –” meaning the Ayatollah Khomeini who they all eminently respect, they wouldn’t say one negative thing about the ayatollah. Even if he had a private club and a golf course, which he doesn’t, they wouldn’t ridicule this guy at all.
Remember when Mike Wallace interviewed the Ayatollah Khomeini, 60 Minutes, 25, 30-years — remember that? “Imam, imam, imam.” Most respectful thing you’ve ever seen. Nobody in the U.S. interviews Trump this way. Anyway, here’s the question from Elizabeth Palmer: “There are reports that the Supreme Leader has ordered that any revenge attacks should be proportional and carried out by Iranian forces.”
ZARIF: We are a law-abiding nation. When we take action, it won’t be disproportionate, unlike what President Trump has said. There has been the killing of several Iranian citizens and several top ranking, high-ranking Iranian military officers. That is what we will do, and we will do it not in a cowardly way, but in a clear and proportionate way.
PALMER: When?
ZARIF: As we choose.
RUSH: She’s wanting him to do it. She’s sitting there, she’s wearing the hajib, or the hijab, what is it, wearing the hijab, she wearing the hijab. (imitating Palmer) “Imam, when are you hitting Americans? Hmm? Hmm? When? When is it going to happen? We want to be there when you hit.” Don’t tell me, don’t tell me that it is overboard to compare the Democrats and the Iranian rhetoric.
Let’s see. All right. Grab one more. We have time for one more before we go to the break. State Department today, Pompeo had a press conference, secretary of state. And he mocked, you know, this claim here that the Iranians have made that General Soleimani was on a peace mission — he-he-he-he — he was on a peace mission, having just orchestrated the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.
So a reporter said, “Iran’s foreign minister granted an interview saying that Soleimani was on a diplomatic visit to Iraq, that the U.S. strike to take him out was state terrorism, that President Trump is prepared to commit war crimes, that Iranians are enraged. What’s your reaction to this?”
POMPEO: His first statement, that Soleimani was traveling to Baghdad on a diplomatic mission, anybody here believe that? Is there any history that would indicate that it was remotely possible that this kind gentleman, this diplomat of great order, Qassem Soleimani, had traveled to Baghdad for the idea of conducting a peace mission? I made you reporters laugh this morning, that’s fantastic. We know that wasn’t true.
RUSH: I made you reporters laugh. That’s fantastic. We know that wasn’t true.
Related Links