RUSH: Folks, we have just in the last — ah, you could say two days, the last week, we have had demonstrated for us one of life’s most basic lessons. And I want to try to explain this. I gotta tell you, I was so frustrated watching television last night as the Iranians launched their little puddle jumper missiles. I’m watching, I don’t care what channel I turned to, not even gonna mention them. All the networks, they’re acting scared, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Iran’s launched, oh, my God. We pray for American servicemen.”

Where is this attitude? Where does it come from? This is the opening here of life’s lesson. This attitude that we somehow are helpless, that we’re overmatched, that we’re overpowered. “Oh, no. What have we done now? Oh, my God. Look at what the Iranians are doing.” What did Iranians do? Nothing!

The minute I heard last night that the Iranians tipped us off that the missiles were coming, it was plain as day, Trump wins. They did this as a show of face-saving for other Arabs and Persians in the region, but they didn’t dare, they didn’t dare want to injure a single American. They launched the missiles into sand. They didn’t even use laser-guided missiles. They used ballistic missiles. I think four of the 12 didn’t even make the full run. Didn’t survive.

This country, for too long, has had a foreign policy that is rooted in the notion that we provoke the rest of the world, that we are the problem, that we’re not the solution, and that it is our superpower status that is the problem. We’re too powerful. It isn’t fair. We’re too big. It isn’t fair. And the rest of the world hates us because of that. None of that is true.

And yet that is the exact kind of thinking that guided the Obama administration. It’s the exact kind of thinking that gave us Madeleine Albright, the same kind of thinking that gave us the Obama nuclear deal. Inside of a week — well, inside of a couple of months, the United States, Donald Trump, has taken out two of the world’s most active and prolific merchants of death, al-Baghdadi and Qassem Soleimani, both dead.

It did not require a massive invasion. It did not require years to do. Inside of basically a short period of time, one of the greatest gifts to the civilized world has been given: two monsters eliminated. It did not take a land war. It did not cost thousands of lives. It needs to be celebrated, and the awesome ability to project power, the United States, is recognized by our enemies, if not by many Americans.

The Iranians, I told you yesterday, the Iranians know they will be wiped out with Donald Trump if they behave as they have in the past. Trump in his speech today made a point of how big our missiles are. We got big missiles. Our missiles are bigger than yours, and they’re more numerous than yours. He also made a point that the missiles fired last night were paid for with the cash delivered to the Tehran airport “by my predecessor.” That would be Barack Obama.

He’s exactly right. I’m gonna charitable with Obama. And I’m not gonna accuse Obama of having anti-American interests and pro-Middle Eastern interests. I think Obama is like many of the American left today who really think that the world’s unfair because the United States is so big. That we’re the problem and that appeasement is the only way to get along with people. Show them we mean them no harm, show them we love them, show them that we recognize that we are the provocateurs and, trust us, we don’t want to hurt you.

What does that do? It just encourages them to continue to be exactly who they are. Along comes Donald Trump, and inside of a week has sent the exact opposite message to the Middle East, to NATO, to the rest of the world that the United States doesn’t consider itself the problem anymore. The United States doesn’t consider itself the provocateur. The United States is not gonna apologize for what we are. The United States not gonna apologize for what we’ve done. We’re not gonna apologize for what we have.

We are going to protect what we have. We are going to grow what we have because we’re the good guys, and we are the agents of positive change for anybody in the world that wants to join us. And anybody that stands in our way and kills Americans is not going to get away with it. Folks, this has not been American foreign policy for a long time. The reason this is such a standout is because it is so unusual.

We’ve never had an American president in a national television address, like Trump just did, tell the truth about Iran. It’s never happened because we have been guided by previous administrations for decades, with a few exceptions, that appeasement is the only way to peace, that acting as big as we are, acting confident about who we are is unnecessarily provocative.

If you think I’m making this up, let me give you an example that I remember off the top of my head. During the Obama administration, some delegation from the ChiComs was in town, and we started some… The Obama State Department started talking to the ChiCom members of this delegation about their human rights abuses. The ChiCom guy said, “Wait a minute! You’ve got no right telling us about human rights abuses. Look at your past.”

And the Obama guy said, “Oops! You know what? You’re right. We have no right to tell you about human rights abuses because we are just as guilty as you are.” So even though we do have the moral authority — particularly compared to any communist nation, we have the moral authority — to preach, the Obama administration gave it away because of the belief that we don’t have this right, that we don’t have this moral authority or superiority.

So the United States, with Obama and with previous administrations, really didn’t want to use its goodness and its decency and its power because it was all considered, ah, maybe illegitimate or unjust or provocative or what have you. The life lesson here: A show of force — a willingness to be honest about what you say you will do when everybody knows you have the ability to do what you do — is the way to use power for the good, to use power for positive outcomes and results. There’s no reason for the United States to apologize.

There’s no reason for the United States to feel guilty. There is no reason for the United States or its people to feel frightened over these kinds of things. The Iranians? Folks, if it is true — and it is. I saw it last night. The Iranians tipped us off. They tipped off the Iraqis, and the Iraqis tipped us off that the missiles were coming. It’s the surest sign that taking out the number two terrorist in the world was a positive. It was a big win.

It was not an escalation, as the media and the Democrats attempted to say. It was not endangering us further. This is why I got so frustrated watching television last might. It didn’t matter where I went. We know… The Iranians don’t even have HDTV! The video they gave us of their missile launches was cheap, SD quality, and they kept looping it and looping it, and it made it look like the Iranians were launching thousands, hundreds of missiles (sobbing), “And we had no chance!

“Oh, my God! (hyperventilating) We’re praying. We’re hoping tonight that there are no casualties! We don’t know…” Everybody was so convinced that it was gonna end badly for us. Everybody was so convinced that the Iranians — Pfft! — we were no match for ’em, and I’m just sick of this attitude. I’m tired of it. I’ve had to endure this. It’s the attitude of the American State Department, many previous administrations. It’s the attitude of the deep state. All these people that showed up and testified against Trump?

This is the stuff they really oppose: Using America’s power for good. This is what they don’t like. They’re a bunch of appeasers that want to show up and just continue the process of never solving anything while getting accolades for great diplomacy. Well, we just saw the best diplomacy that there is.

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RUSH: Now, for all of you who are concerned that Trump’s actions here in taking out Qassem Soleimani constitute a violation of a campaign promise not to escalate military activity in the Middle East — “Trump was gonna stop this, Trump was gonna get us out of these things, Trump wasn’t gonna start any wars” — I want to throw something out at you. I actually think that what we saw today and what we will continue to see, ’cause Trump…

Did you hear what he did in this speech? Trump urged Russia and China to get out of this Iranian nuclear deal as well, and he told NATO to step up. Do you realize how big that is? NATO has gotten along for these past decades going to lunch and going to dinner, going to cocktail parties, never having to really do much of anything to justify itself because we’ve always done it. He told them to step up. He told them to get involved with it. I think…

To cut to the chase, I think this is all about getting out of the Middle East. Everybody knows that our geostrategic focus needs to be China, the Pacific. Trump knows it. Everybody knows it. We don’t need to their oil. He made this point. We don’t need Middle Eastern oil anymore. We do not have any dependence whatsoever. We are self-sufficient. Our economy is hot, and it’s getting hotter. The market is soaring today after all of this.

The stock market’s not in panic. It’s not in free fall because Trump took out a terrorist. Our military has never been stronger. Trump made it plain today: We hold all the cards, and we’d like to welcome you into a different kind of existence. We’re also told now that the Iranians did indeed, in fact, warn us that they were gonna fire missiles in the general direction of our bases, and I think we let it happen. We let ’em show their action here to save a little face.

After they did it, they’ve come out and said, “Okay, that’s it! We’re done. We retaliated. We did what we needed to do to keep people on our side of the world happy and believing in us.” But they have made it clear they don’t want any more of Donald Trump. They don’t want any more of the United States — and I’ll tell you, folks, it was great to hear Trump blame Obama. It was great to hear Trump say that these missiles that Iran fired last night were paid for by the cash provided by the previous administration.

Now, of course, the Drive-By Media, that causes them panic. So they’re out there, “No, no, no, no! (sputtering) That — that — that money came from the — the ending of sanctions!” They’ll do anything they can to protect Obama. But the bottom line is, folks, what the media won’t tell you, what the Democrats won’t tell you… Oh, by the way, Dianne Feinstein! The Democrats is where the focus of trouble is today, not with Trump.

Dianne Feinstein has told Nancy Pelosi, “Hey, babe, send the articles over here, will you?” They’re getting worried. What is Pelosi doing? Last night during all of this, Pelosi was out having adult beverages at some fundraiser/cocktail party at a restaurant in Washington after making a speech about how serious this was and about how prayerful we all are, about how concerned we all are. There she is out kicking back with Democrat donors consuming adult beverages. Feinstein says, “W-w-what’s with these articles? Send ’em over here!”

They are in a total state of disarray. The Democrats have nothing to say about what Trump did with Soleimani. None of them. Despite all their bluster at Trump’s incompetence, we don’t have any of them saying it should not have been done. The extent of their comments is that Trump shouldn’t have been the one to do it because Trump is unnecessarily provocative. It’s the same old defensive posture that this country has been known for under liberal thinking and leadership for far too long.

Trump’s speech. Not wild-eyed. It was balanced. It was powerful. He had a show of force with all of the uniformed military personnel from national security apparatus standing with him. Vice President Pence. He told NATO to step up. That is leadership, as opposed to the void of leadership that we’ve had for years. There was nothing maverick about it. There was nothing wild-eyed or irresponsible about it. He didn’t say the U.S. would unilaterally act. In fact, he said that Iran is standing down.

He exhorted allies, NATO. Step up. Join us. Here’s the problem for the left, the problem for the Democrats. Who cannot have confidence in America under this kind of leadership? Unprecedented economy, energy independence. We have no economic deterrent stopping us from dealing properly with Iran and other bad actors in the Middle East, because we’re no longer dependent on and hostage to the oil from that region of the world.

I really think that the long-term objective here is to get the United States out of the Middle East. As a focus. We’re never gonna leave it. Don’t misunderstand. But I say this because so many people had this panicked reaction when we killed Qassem Soleimani. “Oh, my God. Trump’s violating a campaign promise. He’s starting a war!” He didn’t start a war and he didn’t escalate anything. He ended it, with a proper show of force that says:

“We’re not going to sit here and stand by idly while you continue to kill Americans, in uniform or not.” Some of you might be thinking, “Rush, you’re just describing the United States as a bully.” There’s nothing bully about this! This isn’t the schoolyard. This isn’t some frat hazing that’s going on here. This is real life, and we’re not being bullies. We are standing up for ourselves and allies because we recognize we are the good guys, and there’s no shame in it.

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RUSH: Grab audio sound bite number 2 from yesterday. I just want to remind you so you can have some assistance here in understanding my attitude about this. This is from yesterday’s program in three, two, one, hit it.

RUSH ARCHIVE: 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 we can do. 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.

RUSH: And what did we get last night but a bunch of face-saving launches of missiles that hit no targets by design. And the Americans were tipped off in advance that this was gonna happen. And we let them do it.

It’s almost like there was an agreed-to policy to let this happen so that everybody could get what they want out of it, meaning the Iranians, because now they fully understand. I’ll tell you who else probably got the message: That little pot-bellied dictator in North Korea, Kim Jong-un. The lessons and the message from this kind of action that we’ve taken against Qassem Soleimani reach far and wide.

By the way, folks, it wasn’t just cable news last night that was acting like (panicked), “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! It’s over. (sniffle) The Iranians are responding! My Gahhhh…” I had to turn it off. I literally had to turn it off. Here’s an NBC News tweet from 8:35 p.m. last night. “Watch live coverage as Gen. Qassem Soleimani is buried in his hometown of Kerman, Iran.” That’s right.

NBC News was inviting Democrat viewers to pay their respects and to weep with Iranians in real time as a mass-murdering terrorist and an enemy of the United States was laid to rest in his cardboard box, after having been flown on three coach seats with only his hand remaining after the attack. And then there was a tweet from Trump last night. Trump’s tweet was 10 minutes later, 8:45 p.m. Trump’s tweet said, “All is well! Missiles launched from Iran at two military bases located in Iraq. Assessment of casualties & damages taking place now.

“So far, so good! We have the most powerful and well equipped military anywhere in the world, by far! I will be making a statement tomorrow morning.” You know what this was? This was one part presidential, one part fatherly, one part written as a friend. This tweet had three elements. He’s calming everybody. He’s letting everybody know that no damage has been done, full report coming tomorrow. “All is well!” Everything’s okay. Nobody can touch us. We have the biggest, the most well-equipped military anywhere.

Master communicator. Informative. Shares a sense of relief and gives assurances the United States is safe because it’s strong. And this was in the face of all the TV coverage last night, “Oh, my God, it could be over! (wailing) Oh, my God, Iranian’s responding!” It really was of that tenor. It was panicked. It was grim. It was dire. And here comes Trump assuring everybody… And I think Trump knew last night, by the way, that this attack or these launches of missiles by Iranians were simply a face-saving move.

What was really learned from watching TV last night? Iranian TV can’t even afford HDTV cameras. The loops were some of the cheapest, standard-definition quality video I’ve ever seen. It was two launches. It was two missiles being launched, looped over and over and over again, made look like thousands were being launched. The Democrat fake news media trusts the Iranian fake news media!

Whatever the Iranian news media was saying — “Thirty Americans dead!” — there’s the U.S. media reporting it without even researching it, without even asking anybody about it, without even questioning it. “Thirty Americans dead, Iranian news sources say.” Iranian news? There aren’t any Iranian news sources! The Iranian news source is the ayatollah. When it was all said and done, Iran’s response to the taking out of Soleimani was as destructive as a neighborhood fireworks show — on standard-definition video.

We didn’t even get HD fireworks out of Iran.

I’ll tell you what else we learned last night and today: Iran understands that Trump means business. They know how lucky they are that no Americans were killed last night. We learned that the Democrat fake news media views Soleimani as a global figure who has earned respect, as we were invited to cry and weep along at his funeral. Democrat fake news media treated Iranian’s impotent response the same way they do an oncoming hurricane. “Oh, my God, we’re gonna die! Oh, my God! We’re gonna die! It’s over. It’s over. It’s time to panic. (Don’t touch that dial!) It’s time to panic. Look at this loop of missile launches from Iran in standard-definition quality.”

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RUSH: It’s very simple, folks. If this was Iran’s response to the killing of Qassem Soleimani, then the killing of Qassem Soleimani was a major victory. And to the phones we go. Madison, Indiana, this is Rick. You’re next. It’s great to have you, sir. Hi.

CALLER: Mega dittos, my friend. I can’t tell you… I represent hundreds and thousands of small towns who’ve lost servicemen to that son-of-a-bitch, and he got taken out by our president, and we couldn’t be any more proud and glad he’s in his grave.

RUSH: Well (chuckling), what’s left of him is in a grave, and beyond that, we don’t know where. Seventy-two, 73 virgins? They’re trying to martyr the guy. We don’t know. But I understand your frustration. Folks, I think this is another example of building and building and building frustration part of the American people for years, for years. We’ve had the ability to do this. This ability to take out a terrorist like this is not new to Donald Trump.

What’s new is we’ve got a president willing to do it. The people of this country have known we’ve had this kind of ability, and yet what we have become is… Not us. Our leadership, our government became a government of appeasers. Don’t doubt me. After 911, what’s the State Department do? The State Department convenes a forum: “What did we do to make them so mad?” It was our fault! “How can we change?

“How can we change what we do to make sure they don’t feel like they have to hit us this way?” I’ve been doing a slow burn ever since that — and if I have, I’m sure countless Americans have been too. Then Obama running around bowing to people and apologizing for this or that and then telling the ChiComs, “Yep, you’re right. We don’t have the moral authority to tell you about your human rights abuses because we’ve got a history of ’em ourselves.”

If that’s true, then no parent has the right to raise a kid, because there’s no parent that’s never gotten into trouble. Do parents have the moral authority to raise their children? They damn well do! But if they’re told, “No, you don’t. You can’t tell your kid what to do! If you’ve done something wrong, you have no right to tell your kid.” That’s the American left today. You know, the paradox, the paradox of liberalism? What do they think they believe in?

“Civil liberties. Total freedom. You can’t tell me what to do. I can tell you what you can’t do!”

But when you’re a liberal, you can’t tell them what they can or can’t do. You can’t tell them they can’t marry their horse. You can’t tell ’em they can’t marry their chicken. You can’t tell ’em they can’t do whatever they want to do — and if you do, then you’re judgmental and you’re probably a Christian. But what’s the paradox? The paradox is that as the left expands all of these so-called civil liberties, what the hell happens to morality? It ends — and that’s where they have taken us.

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RUSH: We got a call from a great place coming up here. Buffalo Gap, South Dakota. And this is Dillon. Dillon, great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hello, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER: I was told to make it quick, so I will. I think the majority of America and Trump voters are tired of living in fear of what’s gonna happen if we do something. America was built on taking chances. Revolutionary War, World War II, the outcome was never known, but we took a chance.

RUSH: Oh, that’s absolutely right. But, you know, it’s more than that. Clearly your point is that risk-taking and confidence are in our DNA. Revolutionary War, taking on the enemies we took on and have taken on ever since our founding and the establishment of the nation through our evolution as a military superpower in less time than any nation in the history of the world.

But you’re exactly right. The American people naturally are winners. Americans expect to win. We do not have a catalog of defeat. Our catalog is of victory. Not just for ourselves, but for people we fight for, our allies. We are the epitome – look, I don’t want to simplify this or make it sound simplistic, is a better way to say it. We are the good guys. You know how provocative that is to certain people?

Folks, there is a percentage of people in this country, when you tell them that America’s the good guys, people like Colin Kaepernick, they literally blow a gasket. They don’t conceive of this country as being good, of us being the good guys. We are all the cliches. We’re colonialists, we’re racists, we’re bigots.

Did you hear what Kaepernick did after we took out Soleimani? He issues a tweet or an Instagram post or some such thing: typical of the Americans to take out brown-skinned and people of color, as though race had anything to do with taking out the number two terrorist in Iran. And there’s a shoe company that will bend over any which way possible to keep this guy happy, Nike.

Race has nothing to do with it in any way, shape, manner, or form. But Dillon in Buffalo Gap, South Dakota, it’s more than just the American people are winners. It’s more than the American people expect to win. Americans have not been led by similar type people for quite a while. Look, I’m gonna remind you again. I’m sorry for the repetition or the redundancy, but there’s a life lesson to be learned right in front of our face here because of the last week, the last two to three days of our engagement with Iran and Qassem Soleimani.

It is not insignificant that in the eight years prior to Donald Trump our nation’s leaders were telling us that our best economic days are behind us. That’s not an insignificant thing to say to the American people. In America, the expectation has been that growth and improvement in the standard of living and the quality of life and life expectancy is always improving.

In America, all of the great things are possible. It’s an America that dreams come true, not just America, but America is known for it. And it just cuts against the grain to have people in positions of leadership try to tell us to forget that, that we need to get realistic, that we have to lower those expectations and that maybe all this economic prosperity in the past, maybe it all wasn’t justified, they said, maybe we didn’t earn all of it, maybe some of it was ill-gotten. Maybe some of it was due to our expansionism and our colonialist tendencies, of which there are none, by the way.

We don’t conquer anybody or anything. We liberate. We don’t conquer people. We don’t imprison, and we don’t impose. I’ve never understood how freedom could be an imposition anyway, but that’s what they try to tell us. The American people, some of them internally rejected it, stay silent about it, but simply thought it was absurd that leaders spoke this way. Other Americans thought maybe it’s true. Maybe we haven’t had it as good as we think and maybe it hasn’t all been justified.

I mean, the Obama people, and even others, have been successful in creating doubt about this country. Go talk your average Millennial if you doubt that. They have succeeded in creating in the minds of a lot of people some doubt about the decency and the goodness of not just countries, but capitalism itself and freedom.

It’s gotten to the point where the differences in economic success from person to person have become evidence of unfairness, evidence of mean-spiritedness, evidence of white supremacy or whatever gobbledy garbage they spew. And they have succeeded in creating in way too many people feelings of resentment for their own country.

Now we happen to have elected somebody that is in his seventies and remembers an entirely different America. The America of Obama and of the American left where America’s to blame, America’s the fault for all the problems in the world, Trump doesn’t know that America. He doesn’t want to know that America. He doesn’t recognize it. He thinks it’s bogus.

So he has stormed into Washington, D.C., intent on nuking that and blowing that to smithereens and once again returning America to its age-old mantra, greatness. And that is controversial. So now we do something good for everybody involved, take out Soleimani, and a number of Americans are scared to death, “Oh, my God. What have we done? Oh, this is horrible” because they just have no experience.