RUSH: Hi, folks. We didn’t have a chance yesterday to do a postmortem on the Trump interview because the show ended, so we didn’t have a chance to discuss it. Now, I thought the president made news at least three times in that interview, maybe four, if news coverage of the president were conventional. But news coverage of the president isn’t conventional.
Most of the coverage, we’ve done a review of it, it’s kind of hilarious. Most of them are ticked off that he was on with me and not with them. And that’s what drove them in their commentary in the president’s interview yesterday, which we will review.
Also, Brit Hume said I went a little too far in saying that the Iranians are no different than the Democrats or that the Democrats are no different than the Iranians in their criticism of Trump. So we put together side-by-side Democrat comments, Iranian comments, and you decide. You tell me if you can even tell the difference. Can’t wait for that. That’s all coming up.
Now, the Drive-By Media is going wall-to-wall coverage of the funeral of General Salmonella or Salami, whatever you want to call him, Soleimani. The media going wall-to-wall coverage of the funeral. We’re getting to see all of the supposed mourners. Now, Buck Sexton, CIA analyst, former guest host of this program was just on Fox and he said what I told you yesterday.
The regime goes door-to-door to ask you if you are going to the funeral, and if you say no, they leave your head in the house and take your body to the funeral. They literally do. They go door-to-door and they ask you if you’re gonna join the mourners, and, if you say you’re not, then that’s the end of you.
Now, look. It’s a big country. There’s some people genuinely distressed that the terrorist is dead, but this big crowd that you’re seeing is — this is a totalitarian state. The people there don’t have any free will and they don’t have freedom of choice. And when the regime wants you to do something, you better show up and do it. He says they’re going door-to-door. And he would know. And you get the mourners there shedding tears for their lost martyr.
But where was this kind of coverage back in November? A million truly brave Iranians took to the streets back in November to protest the regime. Back then the Iranian government killed over 1,500 protesters. They put 7,000 more in jail. And we saw nothing about that in the American Drive-By Media. So after something like that, you have a million Iranians taking to the streets to protest the mullahs, essentially. Fifteen-hundred of them were killed, 7,000 put in jail. That’s just last November.
So now Soleimani disease and they go to door-to-door asking if you’re gonna go to the funeral, and you say no, well, then you get added to the 1,500 dead or the 7,000 injured. And the ayatollah, the Ayatollah Khomeini, he was out there crying. I got a note from a friend of mine, Zev Chafets. You remember Zev Chafets? He wrote a New York Times profile of me, and he wrote a great biography of Roger Ailes.
I don’t know if he wants to be attributed in this email. He sent me a note. He said, “Rush, when I saw the ayatollah crying yesterday, it made me think of the Hollywood producer in The Godfather waking up in bed next to the severed head of his beloved horse. Shock is the first emotion, then bluster comes next, and then you start to wonder what else the godfather is capable of. And ta-da, the singer gets the part in the movie after they leave your dead horse head in the bed next to you.”
Now, if the ayatollah is sane, that’s how this is gonna come down, but that’s a big “if” if the ayatollah is sane. The ayatollah says that Iranians, not proxies, should strike at America. Trump says that the United States will bomb 52 targets if a single American is hurt.
By the way, Brian, throw that picture up. Yesterday — they say this is just a coincidence. Fifty-two F-35 stealth fighters were put on the runway at an Air Force Base in the middle of the country. It was just a coincidence, they said, 52 of ’em. Look at those gorgeous stealth fighters. We’re showing the picture to you on the Dittocam, 52 of them on the gigantic Air Force Base runway.
Conrad Black has a piece today, you know, I’ve talked about this in generic terms in the past. It is about the ability that the United States single-handedly, singularly has to project power in the world. We have no match. There is not a single nation, maybe the ChiComs, but their development is behind ours. We still are the superpower of the world. And every enemy of the United States knows it.
And I think this would be a good time to share with you some of the things that Conrad Black shares in his piece, “Americans Will Rally Around Trump on Iran.” This is a piece found at American Greatness. And let me give you some great pull quotes of this piece.
We are strong in our military and in our economy, and there is no match to either our military or our economy anywhere in the world. Now, Millennials and college students and high school students and leftists, if they are informed of that, are immediately opposed to it and frightened and scared. Some of them don’t believe it. Some of them think that it’s what’s wrong with America. But responsible adults understand the absolute necessity of this.
But just forget the necessity. Just the factual basis, the factual truth: There is no match. There is nobody that comes close in the world to matching our economy and our military, and particularly now. That’s true at any time, whether we’re in a recession, whether we’re in an economic slowdown or now — when we are in an economic revival and roaring along — there certainly is no match. And you add our military to it, there isn’t any match.
Folks, nobody is even close, and they all know it. But here’s the difference. That’s always the case. There has been no match for the American economy and no match for the American military my entire life. Nobody’s even close. The Soviet Union was a Third World economy with a First World military, and they could not sustain themselves. They were a nuclear threat, and that was it. But they had no morality acting as a foundation for their existence. They were destined to implode.
What’s different now is we have a president, we have a leader who has the gonads to use both of these — the economy and the military — to protect this country from little maggots around the world like this General Soleimani and ISIS and all the rest of them, ’cause that’s what they were. They’re not even in our league. It is only our restraint and our acknowledgment of our status as the world’s lone superpower and our morality — the fact that we are the good guys — that stops us from literally wiping the world out of these people.
But if you hit us, we now have a leader who is going to make you pay the price for it, and this is frightening and scary to children on the left, frightening and scary to adults who are children on the left. They have no comprehension of deterrence, no comprehension of strength. To them, strength, confidence, ability, exceptional economy, exceptional military? (sobbing) “Those are all examples of how unfair it is around the world! It’s not fair that America so big. (crying) It’s not fair that the rest of these people are so puny. It isn’t fair!”
So we should handcuff ourselves. They have no idea of the work, the sweat, the blood, the tears, the lives it took to achieve this status, this place in the world. To them, it’s all the result of America being essentially a great crime, and I’m not exaggerating that in terms of how they view this. People like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Crazy Bernie and the rest of the Democrat candidates for president. The United States is an accident: Madeleine Albright. United States is a colonial evil. The United States destabilizes.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
No audible Democrat, no Democrat out there speaking right now understands that Donald Trump cannot lose any of these arguments that he’s having with Iran or with North Korea. We cannot lose. If we decide to engage, we cannot lose. It’s not up for grabs. Land and sea-based power, cruise missiles. The United States has these in theater in both cases. We have Hellfires. We have cruise missiles. We have the military agents of destruction ready to launch on North Korea and Iran or any other enemy on a moment’s notice.
Not from here; from there.
We are everywhere, and we have the ability to project power unlike any other nation in the world. We have the ability to de-calibrate the artillery that the North Koreans have aimed at South Korea from caves just north of the Demilitarized Zone. We could do this in five minutes. I talked to you yesterday about the two relatively new kinds of weapons that we have. One of them is a bomb that digs 200 feet down below the surface of the earth, wipes out anything in caves — including guns, including bad guys.
The bottom line is the United States could destroy every strategically relevant military and economic target in Iran in 30 minutes. If we wanted to do this, we could wipe that country out in 30 minutes — and we have been able to do this for years. Now, we don’t talk about it. It’s not part of the daily news cycle. But this is one of the reasons why the American left so despises America, because we do have this ability, and nobody else does (sniveling), “And it’s unfair, and it’s a destabilization. It’s lack of balance.”
But it’s also the fact that they do not look at the United States as the good guys in the world. I’m not exaggerating. We have the ability to take out any meaningful strategic military target in Iran inside of 30 minutes. Everybody in our military knows it, and there’s nothing they can do to stop it. Trump has made it clear that if there is any move by the Iranians to achieve nuclear military capability… Same thing with North Korea. He’s told both.
He’s not gonna let ’em do it. He’s gonna strike. He has told them both. The North Koreans have made fools of previous presidents, and the Iranians have too. Trump literally is a new sheriff in town. He’s demonstrating that go he’s not just a bunch of talk, not just a bunch of huffing and puffing. Now, the elimination of General Salmonella, General Soleimani, bolsters the mullahs’ realization that Trump means what he says. In other words, the mullahs… Everybody thinks, “The mullahs are mad, and we better be frightened, man. We really ticked ’em off!”
It’s the other way around. The mullahs know damn well what happened. We took out the guy within 30 seconds of him getting off of his airplane. We had intel on the ground. We had intel in the air. We had spies. We had GPS. We knew where this guy was every moment of the day. In the real world, this is the kind of thing that shakes up the bad guys, not makes them mad and should create fear in us. These Iranian threats of retaliation are pure rubbish.
Any retaliation that they engage in is gonna result in them being hit 10 times worse than whatever they dish out, and they know it. “George W. Bush and Barack Obama had a good record fighting terrorism, but they were both taken over the barrel by North Korea, as Bill Clinton was. The total failure of George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion…” This is Conrad Black writing. “The total failure of George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion was particularly evident last week, as the country is largely an Iranian satellite … and everybody knows that Obama gave the store away to Iran.”
And what’s happening now, folks, is that President Donald Trump “is taking it back.” We are not going to survive with the status quo. Trump is taking it all back, and the overwhelming majority of Americans are going to support the president. The Democrats have put their head in a noose, standing over the trapdoor, as they continue to side with enemies of this country because of their foggy view (through the lens of hatred) they have for Donald Trump.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here is Alan in Chicago. Thank you very much for waiting, Alan. Hi.
CALLER: Rush, it’s great talking to you. Rush, Iran’s not gonna take us on. Iran has a $20 billion budget for their defense. We have an $800 billion budget. They won’t attack us directly. What they’ll do is use their surrogates. They’ll go after the 60,000 troops we have in the Middle East, go after private installations and, mind you, that 60,000 is three times what we have in terms of border agents.
I think, though, that the president should accept the Iranian invitation to leave and force the Europeans to act because my big concern, sir, is China. China’s been building a navy, an air force, and nuclear forces, and, of course — and the president has begun to address that — they have satellite defenses that we have not countered and we have to, you know, begin to deal with.
You know, to paraphrase something that Harold Brown once said vis-a-vis the Soviet Union, their nuclear policy, “They build; we build. They stop building; we build.” What it is with China is we fight; they build. We keep fighting; they build. And that’s my biggest concern. That and the fact that the rest of the world, Japan spends less than 2% of their GDP on defense, less than 1%, in fact. Europe, about a half of what we do. No one seems to want to take on the battles other than us. And the strain it’s putting on us is gonna undermine our economy ultimately.
RUSH: So to paraphrase, you think the Chinese are biding their time waiting while we distract ourselves —
CALLER: With a smile as broad as it can be.
RUSH: Right. And we are engaging ourselves in areas of the world that really are not that relevant, in Middle East, I mean, we’re energy independent. Meanwhile, the ChiComs literally are expanding all over the world. They are buying up and —
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: — building properties in Africa, parts of that continent people don’t even know about yet.
CALLER: South America, right in our backyard. We have to be concerned about what they’re doing to position their military. You know, we are focused on the wrong thing. And I think Donald Trump is right in wanting to get out of the Middle East, but Europe will have to deal with the consequences of that, India will have to deal with the consequences of that, the Saudis will, and let them step up and take that responsibility. It’s their turn.
RUSH: I understand that, but I just don’t think any of them can. The Europeans can’t —
CALLER: Oh, they certainly can. Europe’s economy is larger than ours. They spend —
RUSH: I’m not talking about their economy, I’m talking about their will. Look, they’re led by a bunch of left-wing wusses.
CALLER: Amen, you got that right. Absolutely.
RUSH: Look, I got a break coming up. I want to ask you more about China, ChiComs, and what you think their ultimate objective is, ’cause while they’re smiling and biding their time, they’re not standing still. So you’re right about this. But I don’t think Trump’s unaware of it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Alan from Chicago is no longer with us. He either hung up or he got disconnected or one of the two. Look, any time something like this happens — any time the United States extends itself militarily, responds to an attack/initiates one — you’re always gonna have, “We’re wasting our time! It’s the ChiComs that are big threat,” or, “We’re wasting our time! It’s the Soviets that are a big threat. It’s a waste.” You’re always gonna have that, some people who will make a comment on that — and the Iranians are chump change.
They don’t have any big defense budget. We can handle the Iranians like you said we can. In 30 minutes, everything that matters to them is gone. Look, the Chinese are formidable, and they look at us as an enemy, but it’s tempered by the fact that, folks, the world needs the U.S. market. I don’t care what anybody says, money makes everything go around — and if you resent that, too bad. I mean, it does. And the United States economy is the market that the world will not lose.
So a military strike that would wipe out the United States? That’s not something that the ChiComs would have in mind. Not to say they wouldn’t use military strikes. They could take out… If they wanted to show force, they could hit military installations all throughout the Pacific, ours. They could try to take out some aircraft, any number of things to show their ability and so forth. But then the risk involved in doing that is such… If they think that such military action’s not necessary to achieve their goals, then they’ll never take it anyway.
But they are ramping up to be able to project power. They’re ramping up to be seen as having the ability to project power. It’s a deterrence. And they’re no doubt competing with us in this region. Now, we’re got trade negotiations going on now. You know, I think the president likes Xi Jinping, and he thinks that he can succeed in rearranging the trade deals or the trade agreements that we have that can result in the current disadvantages that we experience — which are purposeful — being reversed.
But I guess the point is, the Chinese are not sneaking up on us. It’s not as though our hitting General Soleimani means that we’re distracted and not aware of what the ChiComs are doing. And this is the point that a lot of people try to make. “You know, we’re really misfocused here, Rush. We’re working here on the Iranians, we’re in the Middle East, and that’s really not the problem! The ChiComs inching up on us, buying property everywhere, building all those islands off the coast of the mainland.”
We know all of this. They’re not sneaking up on anybody. We got spies; they’ve got spies. We have cyber abilities; they do. So it’s… I don’t want anybody to get the impression that ChiComs are sneaking up on us and making advances that we’re not aware of and that we’re not prepare to repel or to deal with. Certainly not this administration, by the way.